You still see the overturned car in the breakdown lane,
hear the sweet sound of the clothesline spanning the backyard
from the upper and lower flats of the two-family
where the peeling paint effected a sort of medieval mural
whose intricate cryptograms
you documented with a toothbrush.
The pages of your biography
appear in a snow globe on a piano in a doilied parlor
where a tabby paws her way through a dream.
The two small boys huddled in a stairwell
paging through pictures of monsters in Life
offered to edit your musings
but you were too busy with stoop-ball
and with tomatoes pilfered from your neighbor's garden.
Later you were awakened
by crows cawing in a cornfield
and by a greengrocer pleading for an extension
which would never happen
because of a news anchor's special report
on deadbeat dads
who call in for take-out and disappear.
The music teacher down the block
is offering cello lessons at half price.
How many times did you talk about cello lessons?
How many times did you finetune the lawn mower
threatening a journey
to the seven wonders of the neighborhood?
The fortunes in fortune-cookies
leave you breathless and eager to catalog their hidden meanings.
You spend hours googling Oreos.
Your friends were as surprised as you were
when you closed the blinds to your apartment
and took up residence in a cemetery, where daily,
between rounds of stripping wax at the local elementary school
you watch others place flowers
on what you believe to be the graves of little-known castrati.
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