Now, of course, I could have told you that from the start.

The start was, it began like this . . .

Really, she really was a grandmother, not mine but yours, sprightly hunched and bent over as she explained Morning Glories as she accidentally ripped them all out. She was small and wizened, grey with a trowel, a farmgirl so old and displaced she planted flowers in a city backlot that grew only debris and wild, wonderfully wild weeds.

You moved away, you moved away like everyone else I will only congratulate and never blame, so many times you moved away and came back like the seasons. An old lady dug up my backyard weeds and I just drink beer.

I kneel bent over in the sun a screwdriver in my hand, my fingers bare worn talons, I claw at the crabgrass in the crevices of the brick walkway knowing I will never do this again.

I languish forever. This is my style.

A scarab of a decrepit woman who picks and scrapes, scratching at the windows at night. She represents, no, she is you and everyone else.

Thanks, I appreciate the postcard, it makes me feel noble.

Don't speak to me, avoid me at all costs, I make for a nice warm memory in a few photos in a scrapbook.

An official letter arrived: clean up and cut down your weeds or else. Laughs and laugh upon laugh. My only legacy is history. We all laughed and had a good time.

Really, really I do try hard, unrecognized hardness in my softness, I sit down and the toilet seat is a U-shaped block of ice. Do you remember? Do you remember your summer sweat-stained shirts? The post box is my answer.

There was this old lady . . . you and your shoes. You and an old mirror, broken, reflecting and refracting a hundred different images of me in a chair, of me in a chair, gristly and ugly, a shard of me in a chair.

+ + +

Out in the backyard is where they are, step out the door I say, mind the broken glass where someone dropped a jar, it inches toward the mound of spent kitty litter, you see I dumped the cat box into a brown grocery bag, I rolled down the top, I left it out there until later, and later, several days later, it rained until the bottom ripped out. Out past the weeds that grew so tall this past summer, they were pretty with little white flowers and they grew so tall they bowed over and died. Follow the brick walk, underneath the grass the brick walk to the tree stump, I never saw the tree that I'm sure was majestic, I only know the stump as it has rotted and grown soft; each spring a green shoot springs from its bowels, it grows sure and proud four, five or six inches, withers yellow and is gone. There lining the fence, or where was the fence, disassembling itself board by board during windstorms until the night some drunks kicked the rest of the damn thing down, there is where you stand. Twisting out of the rock garden of shattered bricks and pieces of broken-up concrete, persistently lavender and pink, thriving on exhaust fumes, you don't even have to be here, the flowers are doing very well, thank you.