Sometimes I drive past the blue house
with its ashen roof and white trim, note
the collected changes of a decade –
gone the bushes at the end of the cracked
driveway, gone the redbud popcorn bloom of spring.
There’s a small garden in the backyard
where the above ground pool used to bring
the family together, and the wide oak, sick
with canker and BB pellets, no longer leans
heavy into the porch, lending shade to those
unforgiving summer evenings.
I see you, bouncing room to room as if we
were too poor for doors, your hair electrocuted,
the bottom of my outstretched t-shirt scraping
the carpet. I see the home movies where you
played all the parts. I see our first dog, scarred
by coyotes – still her tail thumps the floor.
The old neighborhood is a horseshoe in
the wandering lens of a cold satellite,
a postcard with a watermark so fine
you don’t have to hold it to the light.
The door is locked, but all our ghosts still haunt inside.
Evening Panoply 