EVIDENCE

	All week the curtains have bellied in.
Shadows climb past the window,
		and each afternoon one strays
	inside, across the narrow sill,

	a girl with a querying, soft tread
approaching her infant brother,
		too pretty, she thinks, to be a boy,
	his face too lively with sleep to trouble.

	Someone has oiled the good oak trunk
under the window, left statice,
		snapdragons, a fan
	of thank-you notes on the bed,

	as if it were late July,
and the afternoons still brilliant, full
		of elms and their low speech
	like a river's. Withdrawing, a shadow

	is the consternation of woods,
of riverbanks, like the misgivings
		in a wise, dark-eyed, immortal sister
	at the evidence of change—the light

	as it finds out listless rooms,
stubborn features on a landscape,
		as it sets each in a motion that is,
	at first, the motion of something else.

		                             - John Palmer

All rights to this poem belong to its author.

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