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Mr. Woods sat, afternoons, on the front porch
of the grey stone house across the street from ours,
a daughter sometimes knitting there with him.
"Cancer," Millie'd said. "He's not got long."
Once or twice Dad, walking to his car,
waved and said, “Hey, Woody.” Mostly, though,
a thick veil separated our two worlds.
I watched their lives, a kind of pantomime:
his wife would come and stand in the doorway,
her apron on. Then she'd go back inside.
Silent movies must have been like this.
What knowledge could resolve the mystery:
why some homes opened easy to my gaze,
while others stayed in shadow, all opaque?
On our own side of Waterman I knew
in a happy, gracious neighbor way
every family, going up the hill.
Across the street, from our front porch I watched
three household dramas, two of which starred friends:
a man named Carl, on one side of the Woods',
would argue with his aged mom each day
while walking to his car to drive to work,
yet always turn and smile and wave at me,
and on the corner, on the other side,
Mrs. Hahn, raised on the East Texas plains
put palm to forehead when the dark clouds massed,
scanning the sky for funnels, then would tell us
when time came to seek shelter in the basement.
Farther up the street were mysteries, too,
people I knew but did not really know,
still others whose names I'd never even heard,
walled off in the brown brick of their homes,
but the Woods lived right across the street.
From our front window, they were the ones I saw
and could not speak to — and could not forget.
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