Hide and Seek

Naturally we expect the bottom
to fall out of this cold, and anything
like balance to go stumbling along
into dangerous wind. I knew a

woman who expected love even
from the corner building, the storm grate.
At this moment, she’s flying to
India where she will dot her forehead

as she would a small i, flower petals
raining at her sari’s hem. I knew
a boy who won’t ask secrets of deer
anymore. He’s been walking through woods

each morning since he turned ten, each morning
posting messages in the private
code of broken twig and spit across
the wood chips. Once a week, deer answer

with tufts of fur, a scent beyond his
scent. He felt the bottom fall from a
great silent kingdom inside his heart
that afternoon older boys chased him

from the trail. The woman chanting now,
these finger cymbals, her own bald head,
make a white blur in a large brownness,
a cotton ball in a field. Her master

sits still halfway up the far northern
mountain. The older boys might as well
be cougars, animals we never
see but always wonder about once

our dogs go missing or we hear strange
sounds at night, outdoors or indoors, like
the stirrings of a spouse with something
to hide. I know a man whose favorite

sport is keeping facts from his wife. She’s
lost her keys, he knows where, but won’t tell.
He hides her check book, her favorite bra,
the book she’s reading. He erases

phone messages, feeds her grocery list
to the fire. When he was young, others
never caught him slouched in the hamper
right there at the hallway’s end. Find me,

he wanted to shout. The woman takes
off her red robe, as if to lay down
the blood moving inside her. Instead
of the color of earth, it’s her own

white thigh that greets her, its faint rivers
flowing south. The boy never needed
to leave the woods. Had the older ones
come close enough to grab him, he knew

by then to turn and meet their cat eyes
to send them away. He let himself
be chased from the woods so the cougars
could end up eating each other, their

wind of pursuit suddenly ended
at a street banked on each side with snow,
the houses all steaming, ready at
any moment to fall through empty

basements into the next world.