The house next door -- the downstairs light’s
different through a side window.  No one's  
home to call.   The couple who live there, the Baileys, 
travel north each year for the season's fly-fishing --  
nobody to dispel or confirm my fear.  So  
puzzled, I stood the first night, a month ago, 
after taking out  garbage.   I'd stopped, 
stared across,  certain the light through  
the front room blinds had changed to brighter.
I dragged my wife out to look.  Skeptic,  
she squinted hard,  squeezed my arm, 
claimed she could see it, too.  But her face 
said "?".  She could have cajoled me --  
fall coming, my fiftieth birthday.   But I was sure, 
so called the police,  two young men with guns, 
flashlights, attitudes.   They snooped about, 
checked doorways and bushes, tested windows.  
The youngest, a  surfer-type with full blonde 
moustache, patronized me --  "it's  good 
when neighbors look after neighbors."  
Then climbed back into their car and were gone.
 
Tonight the light's here still, brighter, and it seems 
the neighbors have been gone years, not weeks.  
Each night,  I post myself by the fence, recalling
Mr. Bailey's story -- how, once, years back, 
they returned from a trip  to find a back window 
jimmied, one suit missing  from the closet, 
and a man's dirt-crusted trousers kicked off  
in the floor,  no sign of identity, nothing else gone.  
Since then, when I feel vagrant.  That presence
ghosts the alleys, howls in the fall wind, 
overturns trash cans. I've seen it 
hiding in shadows of the persimmon, brushing 
eaves, where an elm scratches a window.
These nights I  pause and listen to the wind
as I look through the neighbor's window.  I've
climbed the fence, cupped  my hands to glass
and looked through blinds, into their hallway,
waiting to catch a glimpse of a fleeting form, 
some shadow shifting inside.  I sense the cold chill 
of an empty house, and know that one night
soon the Baileys will come back to fill the space 
with their routines.  But tonight, sentry for them 
in fall cold, I look across, vigilant, listening to my 
heart  type out shapeless dread, hoping against 
the dark there's nothing there, nothing at all.

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