The child begins to walk
toward her own private sleeping place.
In the pocket of her bathrobe
she clinches a hand grenade.
She is lumbering through the lumberyard
like a titmouse with goosebumps.
She waves good by to the orthodox dart games.
The noodle shops have returned
to their anthills, gulp, and a single spoor
has traveled all the way from Wichita
to tuck her in and tell her a story.
There, at a juvenile crossroads,
livestock are dragging their saliva
in a semicircle, it is like pulling taffy.
The child stands there for a moment,
sees herself as an ancient washerwoman
playing bingo on Saturday nights.
She, the child, is counting lemons
and squirming before a quiz.
She is standing in a vestibule,
an airless, gravelly vestibule,
when a hearse pulls up and offers her a lift.
Audibly aching, she swerves to miss
some typhoid victims (being shampooed by
an uncle on furlough?) (who pampers her
with infinitesimal sighs?) and bounces
into bed at last as into a cedar bough.
And the sandman stops playing pinball
to mend her cocoon, to rinse her shroud.
He has had his eye out for her all along.
Her tired little soul could not survive another war.