Roofless

Sun between the banister,
morning through the ivy,
this house with its open worlds
closes nothing to searching ghosts
or their reflections in the windows.
Her feet count the steps to a bedroom
strung with bursts of net curtain hanging
like blanched vines. They draw
in the night through their fleshless leaves.

Outside, a neighbour watches,
busy watering his dead fuchsias.



Her hands leave meanders in the dust,
and capture a butterfly in a teacup,
halfway between a streetlight heaven
and the desires she pinned on the sky,
where she’d always figured heaven flitted
away from the rain.

Snapshots don’t make memories
when the mottled  hues of music and voice
are lost with the dust between linoleum
fractures (arteries take blood to the heart)
like paint sucked into the earth.

He allows the dusty wings to rub off colour
on his wilting progeny. They are choking
on the early frost, and euthanasia sits in a flowerpot
in the shed, mixed with dust and cobwebs.

For a moment the house remembers
the feeling of rain running over its tiles,
like streams of ghostly tongues racing
in cycles back to the sky,

and she feels it too, like a choir
singing in rewind, blowing blue-grey
into dawn’s clutch of swooning mist,
while a pair of wings seep the last of their colour
into the puddles pooling on the carpets.

(Revised: 25/01/2011)