As the poem begins, the speaker appears to be rubbernecking. "There's been a Death, in the Opposite House," he says—and the caesura in the middle of the line makes it feel as if he's pausing in the middle of this news to peek through the curtains again. This will be a poem about both the eerieness of death and the difficulty of keeping any news private for long in a small town.
The speaker doesn't have to see anything as telling as, say, a weeping mourner or a coffin delivery to know that a neighbor across the street has died "as lately as Today." Rather, he detects:
[...] the numb look
Such Houses have — alway —
The "numb look" on the personified house's face suggests that death has a creepy, spell-like power: the news seems to radiate out through the house itself, changing not just the lives of the mourners, but the world around them.
And the speaker knows that "numb look" well. Houses in which someone has just died "alway" (that is, always) have the exact same look, he suggests. This isn't his first rodeo: he's watched death from a distance before and knows how it plays out.
Readers might already be wondering about the speaker's tone in these first few lines. Considering that the "Opposite House" is right across the street, the speaker doesn't seem worried (or even curious) about who has died: "There's been a Death" feels rather chilly and distant as compared to, say, "Oh my word, I think my neighbor Sue might have died!" But perhaps, as readers will see, that emotional distance comes from unease as much as indifference.