Gone

Gone

 

The young teenage girl in the house next door,

                                    four floors down,
who used to jump on her backyard trampoline
at all hours between dawn and midnight,
                                    a bobbing silhouette
beyond the milk of yard lights, bulbed with head-            
phones that sealed her like her layered clothes.                  
The high rhythmic creaking of the springs, almost     
                                    like a voice,
brought us to the window. No tricks or even
                                    variation in her
jumps, just lightly straight up and down, up and down.
She never jumped longer than about fifteen
                                    minutes, never
let more than two hours go by between sessions.
“Autistic,” people said knowingly, which took us     
                                    nowhere fast.
The ice storm a year ago brought a maple limb
                                    down across the
tramp’s saftety bar perimeter. It stayed that way
a few months, crushed and unused, and then
                                    one day was gone.
I wonder sometimes what she does for soothing
self-stim now, what form it takes. For I know              
                                    that kind of
restlessness never goes away, though often, yes,           
it’s forced to move indoors, often for good.
Already it’s hard to see the circle where grass spent
                                    two years in the dark.