The cats came to us having forgotten everything: feral under the leaves, mange-stripped, fierce bones in knotted crouch. We were still peeling plastic from the windows, stacking boxes in their rooms. We were surprised to feel this new, lost along the back roads, everything so green and tangled: black haw, huckleberry, Virginia creeper, yellow forsythia glowing in the yard. Food on the back porch, milk and tuna in white saucers your mother bought us. Even the wild ones ate. In the summer storms, the many limbs slunk belly-low under rhododendron. In the back yard, a river grew beside the footpath. The kitchen streaked with grey light, the bedrooms washed clean in the thrash of storm. The raw wood of the deck was still unsealed, so that it became sponge-soft with the rain. After, we found footprints—yours? mine?— dimpled on the boards. When I woke in the night, I heard no rain and the hum of the house gone into deep stillness. What is cool concrete, and what is the absence of the storm, and what are the boxes of napkin rings, fitted sheets, selvedged tablecloths, trivets from Arizona, the blue bowl speckled like an egg, the books I have already forgotten fitted into each cardboard volume so as to become a solid block. And then the eyes, against the glass of the high window, from the deepness of the window well, the eyes glinting, looking in, wanting everything with the pure hunger of the body tied to itself, wanting the tablecloths, the sheets, the unformed objects in the shadows, the light spilling through the doorway, the flashlight that holds the light, the hand, the tendons, the thump of blood, the breathing in an upstairs room, the dark sleep without dreams, the rooms still empty, the emptiness itself.