A DRIED GARDEN

A Dried Garden

These hours I spend watching the proceedings outside my window have increased of late.

Still, I remember fondly when children arrived, and our house was alive with my mother’s voice and the music she instructed her pupils in.

She’d twice toured Europe and was twice the toast of Vienna, a soloist known internationally for her smoldering bow attack. Only in my imagination do I see her holding her conductor’s hand and bowing before those applauding audiences.

But her musical engagements dissolved with her marriage to my father, and I have known Cynthia best from the infinitely sad expressions that lingered on her face and those things that might have been.

He had made his fortune in armaments, and I do not imagine my father wanted my mother for more than a bauble on his arm.

And then his shotgun made us orphans on a December night.

Today, my sister, Felice, will tell me, “Gregory, the gate needs oiling,” or “Gregory, the roof is in disrepair.”

And thus, we hide behind the doors that hide behind the decay of our weed-stricken yard and our rusted gate.

And I am subjected to Cynthia’s ghost as Felice pulls a mournful bow across those gutty strings or hers.

Disrepair? I should think so.

Yet I refuse to leave my window, for I am lost in its funerary dreams.

L Reis