This is a poem called '"Burglary."
"The family will hate most the way privacy
itself seems to have been stolen, and ease,
and deepest sleep.
What is that noise?
An owl thrashing the mouse fluff from its talons,
a spot of blood, like a cast mark above its beak.
A dog loping a slant across the yard, something
that slurs in the wall.
Membranes, the locked windows pass things through, both ways.
The neighbors sleep less well.
And one shuns her cellar for a week,
but it's the smell like a packet of ripped open yeast
and its spoils a family wanted to own
and nobody wants to steal.
Another neighbor sits down to write,
needing to know the name of something
he can't say without a name.
The way when we first wake we look a little
blurred and shapeless, and by shaking off
those waters become unique and familiar to ourselves again,
inhabitants of our names.
The man writing stops for a minute,
he doesn't yet have the name, but a better reason to need it.
He continues to write.
That's why writers call it working.
From above, the neighborhood looks brighter tonight
than usual.
Some of these lights, as burglars would know,
burn to fool burglars.
A light burns where a man is riding.
One cellar light's been on for a week by now.
Though, we can't see it from up here, nor know how we know
it's burning.