Everything Is an Instrument

Animals in the dark are approaching the house

in waves they must have worked out. First,

rabbits who wait in the shadow of the one tree.

raccoons, her family’s goats, which her uncles

as boys had named Dad and Sunshine. Holes

in the earth in the morning, wide enough for a fist,

fingers clenched, a starburst of tracks. The dead

speak through the radio and the grocery store clerk

who, in his handling of coin and bill, says:

Go out there and do good, and it seems as if

he is speaking from a long way off, like the words

have come from a river and not his nicked-from-

shaving mouth. Out there men say: she heard

the dead because she wanted to hear them,

and the street lights snapped off after she passed

because they were going to anyway. But listen,

there were also the animals, and no one has said

anything about the animals, the way, after the first

one died, deer came from the woods. It was late.

They gathered on the patio as if there was a party,

taking from the rose and verbena small doses,

and they were heavy with seed which branched

and bubbled inside them like yeast, would grow

heads, then horns. Then there would be others

to also come with coin-clicking tongues, to offer,

then swallow, her only fare home.