Corn Stalks

I hear them as they
scrape
their fingers
up the pale staircase

down the corridor,
these black clowns of fall,

strips
of decrepit
love
like abandoned
widow webs.

They rattle their ribs in the new-fangled
cage of November.

Somehow no one sees their body.
It is left underneath a sheet of yellow light

for me

the mystery of their death
emerges in the darkness like a man entering the room
with a syringe

It grows
complex
and has too many fingers for my hands,
for the iodine brown dots of my eyes.

The field’s history begins with winter mud.

It is still as the white house
whose inhabitants have
moved away.