Author's Reading (requires RealPlayer)

Often, now, the paths lead nowhere.

Take, for instance, these brick ways
skirting untended flower beds;
they reach to patches of sandy earth
and abruptly stop: a standpipe,
shrubbery, segment of lawn
mark out where the houses were,
show houses in a private garden.
Here, I used to sit and read
the baby asleep in her trolley;
weekends, families would come
enjoying the spacious properties,
children given a coloured balloon.
Among last signs of habitation,
weeds seeded into crevices,
the odd smashed tile, coarse grasses,
I look for a place to sit down.

But the benches have all vanished,
their varnish peeled in the sun.
Though I came with a sense of trespass,
no taciturn gardener, no custodian
stares at me pushing the child to sleep.
Like earthquake damage, divorces,
dead dirt where structures were razed
has been left to its own devices--
herbaceous borders bereft of people
to make themselves useful for.

Somebody'd made the decision.
Before you know it, that wheelchair
with well-wrapped-up blind crone
being crooned love songs by a carer
and what we called the house museum,
its dream residences, are one
more memory in need of a home.