It’s true Mattie Lee
has clean disappeared.
And shouldn’t we notify
the sheriff? No use, Will
insists, no earthly use.

He was sleeping one off
under the trees that night,
he claims, and woke up when
the space-ship
landed—a silvery dome

with grassy-green and red-
hot-looking lights like eyes
that stared blinked stared.
Says he hid himself
in the bushes and watched,

shaking. Pretty soon
a hatch slides open, a ramp
glides forward like
a glowing tongue poked out.
And who or what is it

silently present there?
Same as if Will’s
trying to peer through webs
and bars of gauzy glare
screening, distorting a shape

he sees yet cannot see.
But crazier than that
was when Mattie Lee
came running from her house
toward the thing.

She’s wearing her sunflower hat
and the dress the lady she cooked
for gave her, and it’s like
she’s late for work the way
she scurries up the ramp.

And it seems to Will
that in its queer
shining, plain Mattie Lee’s
transformed—is every teasing brown
he’s ever wanted, never had.

He’s fixing to shout, Come back,
Mattie Lee, come back;
but a heavy hand is over his mouth
when he hears her laugh
as she steps inside

without even a goodbye glance
around. The next Will knew,
the UFO rose in the air—
no blastoff roar, no flame,
he says—hung in the dark,

hovered, shimmered,
its eyes pulsing, then whirred
spiraling into the sky,
vanished as though
it had never been.

Will’s tale anyhow.
All I’m certain of
is Mattie Lee’s
nowhere to be found
and must have gone

off in a hurry. Left her doors
unlocked and the radio on
and a roast in the oven. Strange.
As for Will, he’s a changed man,
not drinking nowadays and sad.

Mattie Lee’s friends—
she’s got no kinfolks, lived
alone—are worried, swear
Will was craving her
and she held herself too good

for him, being head of Mount
Nebo’s usher board and such.
And some are hinting what I,
for one—well, never mind.
The talk is getting mean.