The Game.
And on certain nights maybe once or twice a year, I'd
carry the baby down and all the kids would come.
All nine of us together, and we'd
build a town in the basement on boxes and blankets
and overturned chairs.
And some lived under the pool table,
or in the bathroom, or the boiler room,
or in the toy cupboard under the stairs.
And you could be a man or a woman, a husband or a wife,
or a child, and we bustled around
like a day in the village, until one of us turned off the lights
switch by switch and slowly it became night
and the people slept.
Our parents were upstairs with company or not fighting.
And one of us-- it was usually a boy--
became the town crier.
And he walked around our little sleeping population
and told the hours with his voice, and this was the game.
9 o'clock and all's well, he'd say,
walking like a constable we must have seen in a movie,
and what we called an hour past.
10 o'clock and all's well.
And maybe somebody stood in her sleep or a grown up baby cried
and was comforted.
11 o'clock and all is well.
12 o'clock, 1 o'clock, 2 o'clock, and it
went on like that through the night we
made up, until we could pretend it was morning.