No eccentricaunt, no gardener, no family friend
Smiling amongthe bric-a-brac and murder.
Only asuburban house with the front door open
And a dogbarking at a squirrel, and the cars
Passing. The corpse quite dead. The wife in Florida.
Consider theclues: the potato masher in a vase,
The tornphotograph of a Wesleyan basketball team,
Scatteredwith check stubs in the hall;
The unsent fanletter to Shirley Temple,
The Hooverbutton on the lapel of the deceased,
The note: "To be killed this way is quite all right with me."
Small wonderthat the case remains unsolved,
Or that thesleuth, Le Roux, is now incurably insane,
And sitsalone in a white room in a white gown,
Screaming thatall the world is mad, that clues
Lead nowhere,or to walls so high their tops cannot be seen;
Screaming allday of war, screaming that nothing can be
solved.
From: The Fall of theMagicians (New York, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947). Included in TheCollected Poems of Weldon Kees (Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1975)
