ALLAN PETERSON

Requiem

It may have died of ghosts asking for companions
as in the old explanation.
A hawk moth tenting its wings against the house
today like a dusty suction,
a pleading for someone to move closer to the wall.
I found it dead the next day under the rocker.
A house is complete with comforts and intrusions,
beggings, circulations, rats.
And there are things next to us, transparent in the air
but thick as visions through an iris diaphragm,
puzzling as the last few blank pages in a book
when someone may have been distracted
and quit writing abruptly because they heard something
without saying everything, though there was room.