Mark Thomas Noonan

She left at night, and quietly,
her Doppler-slide mistaken for the wind,
or distant sirens, the call of a loon,
not the open and close of the door to the basement.

She must have put the car in neutral
and rolled it for the first few hundred feet,
my grandfather said, or else he'd have woken up,
knowing that old engine like a woman's voice.

In the morning the fire wouldn't start for Dad,
so he let me do it. He put the kettle on,
and we listened to the radio. It felt like
we didn't talk for days, any of us.

I swung on the gates, then, till Martin came
from next door. We took off together,
down to the lake, threw stones
at the giant fish we'd invented the summer before.