Where it should have been there were only memories.
They like it anyhow and lived there. For them
The moment it fell down was the moment it lifted up:
Livable-in at last.
A pantry full of regrets; a garden
Planned out in the shape of a plan, lush
Wish *what-might-have-been* and *O-if-only*;
A folly where... on fine afternoons...
And the parties they threw there were, or rather,
Imagined themselves throwing, who had never been
Much for parties, but "Better late than..." - and the rest
Of the phrase lost in laughter. Love bloomed
In the nonexistent parlor: the piano
That never was was closed, suddenly,
By the woman who looked at her hands so as not to see
The face of the young man who knelt at her side,
Enrapt. Impossible ever to know
If it was the sunlight which had faded those curtains
So slowly that no one had seen, or whether
They had been wrong about the color from the start.
(c)1999 by Laura Mullen
All Rights Reserved
Featured in: ~After I Was Dead~
The University of Georgia Press
