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An Open House
 

Loose in the house, lightning bugs scrawl glowing loops.
Through windows opened wide as they'll go, without screens,
the bugs come and go, cut and flow past our eyes as if we're not here.
I never noticed before that, like stars, lightning bugs glow different colors.

I want to ask why she took off her screens, why she lets the bugs in,
to come and go, to drop where they die, collecting in small drifts.
My friend is too sick now to sweep. She lets me cook dinner. We lie
on the sprawling couch, with her dog between us, and watch movies. 

It's an unreal face on a glowing screen that the insects crawl on.
In loose, almost aimless circles we talk, while I pet her dog, feeling
the warm small bones under my hand. I stay up as long as I can.
Even with morphine, she stays up playing solitaire into early morning.

It's too still and warm to cover my face while I sleep. 
In the morning she shows me a mud dauber nest she's knocked down.
Not for the first time. Always, the hornet rebuilds it. How can it escape her
that, once she has knocked the nest down, the hornet still needs to be driven out?   

In her garage, brown shining crickets spill from a sack I pick up, grazing
my legs as they fall in a mix of alive and dead. Tonight, my friend sleeps.
I stay up and sweep drifts of insects. Some are alive and trying to leave
from the dustpan. I lift all of them up to the window and let them fall.

The valley at night seethes with the sound of crickets ― a high, rising,
endurable sound that pitches toward something unknowable and stops
near something unsaid. The line between the living and the dead
I used to think of as a door. But it's a window.