Friday Poem: "Foundation Settling"

My parents moved out of our house in Germantown, Maryland in the mid 2000s. I can still Zillow-stalk it from the last time it was on the market; the photos of my former childhood bedroom are unrecognizable now.

Foundation Settling

Alone in my box of night, 
the uppermost room of a tall thin house:
the nocturnal engines and twittering night-birds 
have given up their serenade.  

Somewhere below, through the still air 
green with the phosphorescence 
of the clock-face, a woody snap
separates the quiet.  

If I had a dog, it would raise a sleepy ear.
Instead, I turn, lift my head from the pillow, 
watch the shadows.
Once my father told me such sounds 

were the house settling 
into its foundation; now I wonder 
what pressures bear
down on the beams and joists below me, 

what change in the air,
what molecular shift might have triggered that sound.  
What absence, what held breath, 
what tiny movement from warm sheets to cold --

what heavy quiet, what flutter of an eyelid, 
what contraction might force a joint to click true, 
or make a bent nail break, or bow a heating duct 
against the straight beam that has carried it silently all these years.

This poem originally appeared in Parting Gifts Vol. 12 No. 2.