My apartment lies twenty-on rooms away

I watch the light shift

through the day

inside a half-year-old calm,

in which the dust long ago settled

in the distant glow

of neighbors' intermittent signs of life,

like memories replayed

on a century-old phonograph;

yellowing sounds, noise in the pipes,

voices in the stairwell in a present left to itself,

where books have lost faith in the act of reading

and the water pipe hungers for thirst

while fridge & freezer stand dead silent

in their cavities

with terrycloth towels stuffed

into their gaping mouths,

and the floor speakers in their catatonic salutes

barely recall anymore

either avant-garde sound art

or tradition-laiden Oriental classicism

Six-hundred miles north,

back through uninhabited rooms,

an Apodemus sylvaticus (Wood Mouse)

suddenly lies dead in the middle of the kitchen

like a memento mori

A red-furred cat at seventeen

descends from the water heater

under the sink

and slinks away in its shadow

like a photographic memory;

soft, restrained, utterly devoid of pretext

He probably, improbably, has nothing

to do with the dead mouse

I scoop up the mouse body

with a plastic bag

from a sourdough loaf from Willys

as a glove,

and dump it in the snow

outside the porch

It slithers away

and rolls in under the front step

A restrained thought

seeps time

where I stand

The day rolls off like a wheel loader,

yellow and Volvo-branded,

leaving those who don't keep up with their time

behind

in a string of rooms, pregnant with memories,

away through time