A Home Buyer Watches the Moon

The whole neighborhood is quiet.
The architect who lives across the street
is now the architect of dreams, his cedar split-level
still as a crypt on the landscaped hill.
In the brick ranch house
the city planner turns another spade-full of dirt,
a groundbreaking for his own monument. And I,
who can no longer afford to live
in my two-story, have come out into the street
to stare past the mailboxes at an abrupt dead end.

Quietly now the bats jerk
in and out of the streetlight, their shadows
zipping across the grass like black snakes.
And the moon lies balanced on the roof of my house
like a new gold coin, or the simple face
of an angel in a colonial cemetery.