We have seen a house in the sleeping town

stand still for a fire and the others

where their windows knew it

clothed in the remnants of a dream

happening outside them. We have seen

the one door aflame in the many windows,

the steady procession of the houses

trembling in heat-light, their well-tended

yards, the trellis of cabbage roses scrawled

against the porch—flickering white, whiter

where a darkness breathes back.

How many nights the houses have burned through

to morning. We stood in our blankets

like a tribe made to witness

what a god could do.

We saw the house built again in daylight

and children coming from it

so what a house restores to itself in rooms

so bright they do not forget, even

when the father, when the mother

dies. “Kitchen of your childhoods!” we shout

at the old men alive on the benches

in the square. Their good, black eyes

glitter back at us, a star-fall

of homecomings.

Only when the horses began to burn

in the funnel of light hurrying in one place

on the prairie did we begin to suspect

our houses, to doubt at our meals

and pleasures. We gathered on the ridge

above the horses, above the blue smoke

of the grasses and they whirled in the close

circle of the death that came to them, rippling in

like a deep moon to its water. With

the hills in all directions,

they stood in the last of their skies

and called to each other to save them.