You see so many empty houses
in small towns like the one
I live in. I imagine this one’s
final moments
as the life last
coughs out its door
the key turning
the feet turning
thumping away
a home’s last heartbeats
fading from the porch
Who were these people who showed
their backs to this place?
Did children wave goodbye
from the rear window
as the car crackled from the drive?
Or was this an adult child
settling the affairs
of the last parent dying
and for bad debt
or worse childhood
would not could not
keep these walls, these floors
this sagging embrace of roof?
I imagine those first five
minutes of abandonment
the sunlight sliding down
a corner where a child
once played with his toys
where lovers squeezed hands under the table
where
now
not even memory
only dust
settling
until a stray breeze through a
widening, necrotizing wound
among the neglect
finds it
Those first five minutes couldn’t
have been any more agonizing than
all these days, decades of emptiness
but to think of that final abandonment
the good times over for good
the seasons tucked in to feed….
I hear the surly child in my head
“Take a picture, it’ll last longer”
so I do
and I walk on
“If these walls could talk”
as the saying goes
I expect they would
tell me just that.
From the forthcoming collection Nymphomagic Electroshock and Other Middle-Aged Complaints.
Copyright © 2017, 2018 by Lawrence Roy Aiken.
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