A Wrong Turn

I take a wrong turn and suddenly I’m at my old house.
Windows are frosted and dark, oaks in the front yard crusted with snow.
Huge black birds roost along the slanting roof or startle out into cold air.
I have come home to find my hands or their fluttering ghosts –
fingerprints along walls like a silent storm of moths.
Can this be where my hunger goes when daylight flickers its way into dreams?
I have asked this question before when sea thuds against deserted sand
and winter lovers huddle beneath their coats.
Now it floats up again on waves bloated as fog,
a new vocabulary of empty eyes.  Nothing can be the same.
Tonight I will eat smoke and feast on words others have chewed
and swallowed and chewed again.  Going down, they will burn and burn,
but I will not be satisfied until the meal is cleared away, the table scrubbed,
and my face removed once more, safe in the hall where strangers sleep,
snores rattling the photographs we mount
like killers nailed to their crimes, paying the innocent blood they owe.

Steve Klepetar