The Sudden Walk
after Franz Kafka
When evening comes to find you still
at home and settling down to stay,
when the last rays have lit a cloud
of fingerprints on the storm door
and television’s lambent flame
plays across veneer and glass,
when you have dealt a hand or two,
the dinner dishes cleared away,
and shrugging on the familiar robe,
you open an atlas of the world
to archipelagoes engraved
with light of other longitudes,
when a cold fog descends and drives
every creature down its hole,
when you have sat so quietly
that your least movement brings surprise
to everyone, and when, besides,
the stairs are dark, the deadbolt locked,
and in spite of all, you start up
in a sudden fit of restlessness,
shed your robe, snap a coat
and bang the door shut more or less
emphatically, according to
the pique you fancy having stirred,
and when you find yourself once more
at unexpected liberty,
absorbed in rhythms of breath and limb,
attention racing on ahead
and then returning like a dog
through hawthorn blooming in the dark,
that rich potentiality,
when Mars and Jupiter ascend
above the cloudbank, bright and crisp,
then you become a clean stroke
of ink-and-brush calligraphy,
a lone figure strolling west
on Shenandoah Avenue.
Returning home, still full of such
euphoria, you stop to watch
flitting across your window shade
at this late hour, the silhouettes
of children loosed from all constraints.
