up toilet seats
or the clothes like cast-off
skins or even little sticky plates
under the chairs
and in the corners of windowsills.
It is the heels
they pound upstairs in the morning
loosening floorboards
and the treads of stairs
by tromping up and down.
The whole house
shifts around them, breaking
like a boot around the foot
that wears it down. They wake by unsettling
a haircrack at a time
while I—
softly in old socks
I glide among drafts on the
kitchen floor
making not a sound.