When Sounds Leave

When you hear them pack their bags
Their large feet shrinking away through the door
Their hands on the gate

There are
the spaces they leave

Just there
the poem places a last glance back at the window imprinted with ghost thuds of birds
Tiny carcasses already dropped to the purring mouths of quiet cats with long transparent whiskers to move soundlessly through the night
green eyed

Here the sounds wobble as another marches by loudly
measuring a distance with the certainty of numbers noted down
Where their edges are lost in the overlapping

A sharp urgency flounders
behind a dull puckered
These are not sounds
these are words
interrupted by the sharp announcement of the doorbell rising to be heard past the furniture as if unexpected
Hands clench
small pawed in cotton skirted courtesy
Follow the words trailing
As a shrill wind fills the silence left wide open behind them
Heavy lidded you return to the page which shivered blankly beneath a note written then placed in a pocket
A moment stained with the mottled impossibility
of containing an ending in the telling
remains