Next door, I can still see
the weathervane
aslant on the ridge of their
roof.
Tires, one flat, one missing
the hubcap, peer
through the gap under the
wood fence.
There’s a hill behind their
garage of dead
car batteries, chainless
bikes, someone’s mattress springs.
Today, I crept behind the
trees, where carpetweed springs,
swarming and soon. I squinted through a crack—a jagged vein
in the fence wall. Back there, a fridge lay. Its doors hung open like a dead
bird’s wings. Rain had paled a dollhouse, caved in its
roof,
and the yellow chair was now
a mangled crown on the junk pile behind that fence.
It was Virgil’s chair, where
a year ago, he sat peering;
a front porch phantom as
soon as the sun appeared.
Back then, garden gnomes,
whose heads nodded on springs,
stood guard over flower
beds, fenced
in by steppingstones. Back then, Cathy scolded grandchildren in
vain,
fixed on conducting the yard
with a cigarette for a baton. The roof
of her mouth flashed pink
when she laughed. Dead
moths fluttered to life
whenever she sang. Back then, on dead
afternoons, I crossed their
driveway—a gravel pier
to another world, where
plaster eagles perched on the roofs
of bottomless wishing
wells. Grasshoppers sprang
from the throats of Black
Eyed Susans. Above, a weathervane
spun in perfect circles and
boys tussled, fencing
with sticks and baseball
bats. Back then, I took no offense
to insults slung by Elaine,
the niece who dyed
her hair weekly—last I saw,
pink and blue veins
were sprawling down her
back. Remember the day she disappeared?
For hours, Virgil shouldered
his shotgun, the one with the broken spring,
searching, calling, rubbing
his eyes. Until, look, on the
roof,
there she was, her white
legs, straddling the roof’s
highest point. Today, I could only tell Elaine that the
fence
was my mother’s idea, not
mine. What could I say about last
spring,
when lights spun over the
street? When Virgil was dead
before the ambulance doors
swallowed him, head first? When the sons
appeared
with their bottles, cars,
and cuss words? The weathervane
had stood on the roof, dead
still. And my father built
the fence to make the junk
disappear,
that trash, springing up
from the basement, leaking from the windows like busted veins.