Dusk

All the neighborhood kids come home from the woods
with something missing: shoelaces, a finger, an eye, the words
for table or mother. All the neighborhood kids come home
from school with smooth gray frogs under their tongues.
All the kids come home from church with pockets full
of dollar bills. The mothers and fathers don’t ask questions,
but at night they take a candle and go into the bedrooms
of their sleeping children and stare at their cherubic faces,
remembering when they were children, in the back seat
of the family station wagon, arriving home late after some
party, and how they pretended to sleep so their parents
would carry them inside, though they had grown too big
for such things, yet in the dark insect drone of the driveway
their mother or father, smelling slightly of wine, might bend
down, and they might fake a little sound of sleepy protest
before being lifted–
how they realize now they fooled 
no one, that their parents simply longed to hold their children 
again, and so played along. Now, in the candle-licked dark,
they can’t find their way back to their own beds. The hallway
is wrong, the doors don’t open. The candle burns down. 
The house folds up like a paper boat, lowered into the creek
in the woods behind the subdivision. There it goes, riding
the rapids toward the reservoir’s great ocean.