They sell bundles of clothesline for $6.99.
That's how sad men play shirts from the tree
we named Alice after the ugly old lady
who waters her flowers in postmortem.

Or more likely denial, as water
and love and care and rich soil
is no way to conduct an autopsy.
She saw green when we saw dead.

Yet day after day we drove past her home,
pink paint peeling. White windows whining
and creaking for salvation from her songs.
Alice loved to sing to the floral corpses.

Alice wore pajamas just in case it was time for sleep.
The others called her hag, hippy, and witch.
The others would yell, but we only watched
from down the street or in the park, we watched.

And listened
to Alice
singing.

We sat on the tree named Alice
which hung bent in defeat, an ugliest sin
smoking spewing like milk from our lips
as we murmured along, mesmerized.

She sang low with her tapered watering can
cradled like an infant in her calloused hands
drowning the shrunken bundles of empty stems
just in case, she hoped, it wasn't time to sleep.

And after Alice played shirts
we heard song no more. Just city din.
The empty dead blew away,
the house bought and painted green.

The owners planted hedges in her flowerbed.

The secret irony,
a grand conceit,
was that to Alice
the hedges were brown
and the tree was evergreen.