Strings violin-taut at the knees and elbows,
his heavy head drawn back, the dreaming child
sleepwalks down the ancient basement stairs,
flushed with a secret the dream keeps for itself.

The suspense is exquisite. A twitch at the last step
intimates that year's particular rapture:
carnival colored, brightly lit from within,
a painted plywood puppet theater

of all things. Hard to say if he ever dared
to look inside the jigsawed rectangle
that framed the shallow, mesmerizing stage;
and who can remember what he might have seen?

One speculates-the lost family dog
with Punch's red coat tight between his teeth ;
Judy with a fistful of disappeared balloons?—
but when he woke he cried to dream again.

•

Another morning that same year he wakes
with something new to say. He's the first about
in the grief-struck house, and shuffles a little loudly
through rooms still thick with the night's deep breathing