it's hard not to bump into ghosts in
your house. you've been here
fifty years, or more, and there's
time caught in the marigold
wallpaper; minutes stuck between the
pages of the books you keep
but never read.

you're the unwilling curator
of your own museum-
you have stacks and stacks of
gardener's weekly,
- could build a fort out of them -
but instead sit in the middle looking
lost. you ask after people who've been
dead years, and perhaps it's because you've
seen them in the mirror.

(outside is the tree your
husband planted in the 60s,
spliced out of two and thus
unique. you stare at it sometimes,
and maybe you're wishing for
something-
or maybe it's just out of
habit).