Landscapers

The neighbor's lawn crew arrives, and I realize--
I am here by mistake.

I must certainly be a shadow of a more substantial me--
wearing ten pounds of clothing in the summer time,
out walking where these houses will be.

All you noisy fuckers on your riding mowers,
you are not yet here;
you are not yet born.

Other Me watches her language,
buries her babies,
scorches the muffins, drops a stitch.

For her it is not so long ago that locusts crawled these stalks of grass.
Out on the fields where this burb will rise,
the wildflowers, the pumpkin vines, the snows will pass.

A devil with a leaf blower crosses himself near the property line.
He has heard about the spirit next door--
that misplaced ghost haunting a restless future--mine.
________

Evelyn, By Lamp Light

Give her pages blanket soft

with use, with love, worn--

familiar lines still welcome

those dear ones passed, then born--

love treasured, lorn,

stitch plots taken up, then dropped.

______

for Real Toads mini challenge. Photograph by Ellen Wilson, used with permission.