Their houses are emptied, almost, nearly, of all their valuables, worldly; repositories of remnants lie locked and alarmed: locked against an illimitable force, feebly, foolishly, alarmed against an emergency any response to which can only be probable cause. No deterrent. Nothing can be protected from putrefaction; there has never been any safeguard against taint. A red cancel to blemish the summons. Only open wounds on the tractearth, gashes of infecting possession, festering forlornly in the latemorning sunfrost: food rots in the refrigerator; the fridge and the freezer the twoheaded unit, huge, idolatrous, rots in the open kitchen like an unfilled, welltongued tooth cracked black down the middle of the stinky sink of a mouth that’s told nothing but lies, that’s prayed only to the wrong God for curses. A dozen indentations for eggs on a shelf at eyelevel, empty save unidentifiable stickiness, enspidered. And the refrigerator, the freezer, hums in the mouth, the hum shakes everything loose, rattles fillings domestic: the windows, the shutters, the pantries, cupboards and cabinets their wares flattened out into steps down the stoop toward the slates, the supports, the foundations, the earth below the concrete; and the food rots into smell and the smell rots into room, a wall of smells, walls, a sink of smells, a floor undusted, splotched, dulling, fading, evanescent as dulled, ephemeral as faded, becoming formless as the rot soon usurps, replaces its form: bathrooms of mold, ceilings of fuzz; the siding weathers, blighted cedar shingling (with not even the larvæ or the moths still surviving, whose nests Israel would shoot out with water from hoses, or ash with a torch lit from headlines), the morning newspapers mound on the porches, soak into one great rising page, as the weather weathers itself and the evening editions of newspapers, a mass of wet print blacker than blood: Problem Nearly Solved, says the subhead, Shade to Address General Assembly Meeting of Sanhedrin Today…mail mounds in the mailbox or is held in perpetuity at the postoffice where a few, responsibly, have thought to stop it, ridiculous, too many bills, collection agency notices, magazines, catalogs and bills, always more, always too, unsolicited; lights switch on on a timer, switch off again then again on timers, sprinklers switch on on a timer, switch off, it rains, it pours rain, sprinklers switch on yet again, and then snow; the house settles, the settle settles, the earth swallows the house rotted above deeper down, a sinkhole, a pit; lights switch on with the moon, off with the sun; the keys rest under the welcomemats, a grinding of teeth with the wipe of strange feet; it stops raining, snow, no one shovels, no one sweeps, forget mops — maids have off, depends, or have been brought along, too, attending even in death, tending to the little ones to the end, a last tantrum of breath…sprinklers switch off or are frozen, immobile, the settling of the settle sinks down even more, kneemud then up to the pits, hipwading slime to the sidewalk, deeper the street; grass grows into weeds, unweeded, seeding themselves; telephone rings, machines pick up, a message is left or is not — tears; lights switch off then on again and then off and then, die. A waste of energy, wasted. Affiliated neighbors, many of them let down their shades, will themselves to ignore; an intrepid few gaze out their windows: at the lawns wrecked with neglect, strewn with the rusted carapaces of bicycles, tricycles, left leaves chattering cycles in the spokes of wheels blown onward nowhere by wind — and the oven’s timer, the stove’s watch, someone set for something, it just ticks and ticks, and they tock. Looting wagons, many of them in the northeast, at least, licensed to a certain Johannine familyowned Moshe’s Movers, proud recipients of a government contract courtesy of a friend of a friend — they’re backedup into driveways, they’re being loaded, they’re taking everything left: these schleppers, what aren’t they doing, what aren’t they responsible for; they’re smashing up a last idolette of the Virgin out on the lawn, they’re repoing the samplers, wrapping ornament valuables fragile in tissue, then hauling all of it out; what’s left that the neighbors aren’t holding onto for the hope of return, they promise, it’s just for safekeeping…
