Empty for years, the house can tell us nothing.
Even though it is a maisonette, ostensibly half of a pair.
The other half is normal, inhabited, has a real dog.
Rubbish gathers here, junk mail overfills the letterbox and droops when rain makes it sodden.
The low front wall of bricks has broken in a sad zigzag.
And there are cracks in the white plaster pediment.
Visible windows are merely dark, inscrutable behind wire screens.
The backyard dog next door barks regularly; its owner subscribes to the New Yorker.
But this ruin remains silent:
Quiet as a tortoise or ziggurat.

However, there is a wooden bungalow out the back.
Which nobody goes to, the side path being choked with untrodden weeds.

Dry, like those in the front yard.
There used to be wheelie bins for rubbish, but these have long gone.
This front yard is not a garden, not by any stretch.
It is crammed with a mixture of tall dry native grasses and a sort of thyme.
But this isn’t real thyme, just scentless.
And there’s one upstanding milk thistle.
Also a milk carton, along with two empty paint pots in the porch.
This is wilderness on earth.
Paperbarks in the street outside raggedly loosen ancient stained
love letters, or something archival of the sort.
But no, the vacant house tells us nothing at all,
Egyptian landlord or no.

Hey, there are signs of action,
Meaning mud and a northside drainage ditch.
Out the front a raggedy paperbark dreams on.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe

CONTENTS: MAY 2012