Quitting time, the house painters stack ladders
to sleep safely on the lawn, drive off for lover or beer.
All evening, I trek room to room to open, close, open
windows guillotine-style, to counter paint’s side-effects.
I smell latex as I brush my teeth
during muted TV commercials.

My sleep is all toss and turn, I hear the ratchet
and reach of aluminum toward the open dormer window:
I hear brushes rhythmically slapping the siding
like a washboard, scrubbing dreams away:
stars trail the moon silent in their ballads.

There too, I count the rungs of rise with raccoon paws,
risking a playful hubris and consequence.
No longer flowing, dry paint pleads with me
to believe the willfulness of humble things.
The ghostly pale house does not change
color in the darkness of a deep hour.

In the morning, ladders are dew-clean, innocent.
I discover, among littered chips on the front stoop
dainty white tracks I cannot sweep up.

Frederick Wilbur’s poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out and Conjugation of Perhaps. His work has appeared in The Comstock Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, New Verse News, One Art: a journal of poetry, Shenandoah. He is co-editor of poetry for Streetlight Magazine. He was awarded the Stephen Meats Poetry Prize from Midwest Quarterly in 2018.