Queer

The moon hung queer above the hedge,
tilted like a picture frame
nobody had bothered to straighten.

A crow stood on one leg
in the middle of a frost-white field,
as though waiting for a train
that had never existed.

There was something queer about the morning:
the silence too deep,
the air too still,
the pond holding the sky
with unsettling precision.

Even the clock seemed doubtful,
its hands creeping forward
with the caution of a trespasser.

The lane bent where no lane should bend.
A gate opened onto nettles.
A fox watched from a garden wall
with the expression of a magistrate.

By noon the feeling remained—
not fear, nor wonder exactly,
but the sense that the world
had slipped half an inch sideways
while nobody was looking.

And all day long
the ordinary things persisted:

the kettle singing,
the post arriving,
the dog asleep by the fire.

Yet beneath them ran a current,
quiet and peculiar as underground water.

A queer day,
my grandmother would have called it,

and left the phrase unexplained,

as though strangeness were not an interruption
of the world,

but one of its oldest habits.