Not Quite A Graveyard Elegy

by patrick wright

And now the garden with its rockery and swings —

ghostings of past summers.

Everything could have been perfect, if only it weren’t

for transience: the pile of sticks with dizzying ants,

harbingers: the devastating marching of violets,

the crimson of flowerbeds, a lawn once mowed

by the dead, the serious stench of bitumen,

the fence creaking from desecration of sunbeams ...

Is this where the psyche splits, on each side

a tragedy? — where mum dangled her rubber gloves,

the patio where she carried washing to the whirligig ...

On the verge, spongey through the absence of feet,

I can’t help but see myself in hedgerow crawl spaces,

dens of buried die-cast toys, at the nadir of butterflies,

in the abject silt of suitcases, the spider-egged shed

of misery — six years of age and clinging.