SHOPPING IN LATE AUTUMN AT THE HOSPICE THRIFT SHOP
The turn into the corner shop is a sharp right, and hooks
into where once a grocer sold produce in the chill Maryland fall.
Where once cereal stacks stood in rows, china is stacked as china can,
lopsided and leaning and lusty in their porcelain, like the skin
of a woman, not of a girl, or a child, but loved and worn
from loving, now reliving to be loved again by warmer lips
in country kitchens and high dining rooms. Wooly elbows hang
where meat once hung, the gentleman passed long ago to colder
corners, as meat. One for one, and two for two. Cashmere
is better for the air than cold blood and animal fat. The volunteers
counting hours hang the Christmas ornaments for the old ladies
and poor mothers on poor wages stocking the winter drawers.
Here life begins again, a bag of rags and a bucket of old keys,
the bones of an estate come back to the people whose grandparents built it
perhaps, or serviced it, once ago; the old master's gifts a penny for the dollar.
Here, at least, people give time and hearty face. Too often,
the broken find themselves among the stores of former fashion
and find a bit of themselves looking back. Cracked face, weak heart,
poor bank, the threat of illness hover like a cloud of gnats
in the Indian summer afternoon. Too often death is named the end,
but all ends, from the bottle bottom to the X-ray ghost are secret doors,
a two way mirror in the back of a butcher's store that now offices
a hospice desk, a stack of timecards, a place to rest old things
and return them to fresh hands, to work again.