HIDING, GLOWING PALE GREEN

Circling the gleaming drain
We are strange creatures,
Making up stories and then believing them.
Crayfish, pine trees, fields of corn.
You're absent. You're present.
We played the mangy dangerous game,
Hide-and-seek-risky.
What if they never come looking?

What to do, what you do
When no one wants to find

You stay longer, languor,
A third person is watching.
Little black bugs turn up in your hair.
Trackless feet in the dank black earth,
Sweating, shoes untied, you must pee or die.
Half hiding, half wishing.

I read the paper twice this morning, dully
Thinking instead of how
The sun shone mandarin through the stalks
And what if they never come looking?
Day then, night then.

I turn away laughing for real sometimes,
Now that you have been outmaneuvered.
Tap, tap, tap. Silence. Tap, tap.

Dump the dirt from your shoes before you come in.