There are many clocks around here, as
Father’s people like to keep their schedules.
One in the hall, one in Father’s office, one in my room on the second story.

It’s a biting night.
Six-pointed stars spark coldly
above the mist that convulses
from the towers.
There are still lights on in the chambers across the way.

Beyond the second-story curtains the ghosts take their shape,
bubbling through the silt and grain
of the gray wood.
Thready shirts drip from flaking bones.
Black marks stamp their way over limp skin.
Pale masks,
as slick and as sallow as fish bellies,
gouge their gazes into the dirt.

They don’t see me, and it’s for the better, really.
The specters are strange and I’ve never had much of a taste for them.
Father says not to mind things I don’t understand.

There are more of their faces in the windows below:
colorless little bird profiles that stare and
twiggy fingers that wander and press against lead panes.
They are the small ones who do not slump out of the dismal little huts
every morning …
except, of course, when they go to the towers.
Then they drift in their cadaverous flock, tumbling on pigeon legs
and directed by Father’s people.

The ash figures I watch are making their way across the dusk-sunken plane to
crumble into these huts.
Father says not to mind things I don’t understand,
but I would like to.
I can sit here at this window and stare
at the creatures and their paleness and their bird feet,
but I will never learn anything from behind these curtains.

The faces have fallen from the windows for tonight, though
I can still see the eyes there if I look long enough,
but it’s as blurry as the golden mark of the new birds.
I don’t like the blurriness.
I will go tomorrow,
I decide.
I will go to meet these birds and I will see what it is that spews from the towers and
I will understand.