We grabbed a Sunday paper
and scoured the news of floods and rapes,
obituaries of disease.
Looking for a yard sale like other plebeians
of a culture tied to stacking things it owned--
or sad reverse.
Grand Estate! Don't Miss This!
A stream of sheep flocked through those doors.
House lit up as rotted pumpkins
long past someone's Halloween.
Fleecy curtains drowned in dust.
Furniture tagged like body bags.
China plates with chipped old rounds--
fingernails the world had torn.
Silk bookmarks in the shape of crosses
didn't seem to matter much.
Monopoly of desperation
crawling through the moldy grass.

Mirrors were taken down from walls,
hands collapsed in ruined prayer.
Tipped against a spiral staircase--
contorting all those memories
and glimmer trains of hearts at war.
Recipes for suffer's steaming casserole
between the lines of "worthy" things.
In a soggy cardboard box on the patio,
away from crowds of greed-soaked grief,
there lay so many concert bows:
a tarnished thimble no one wanted;
pillows off a leg-less couch;
photos of a striking woman,
backing torn and painted in rusted sepia.
Her needlepoints had disappeared,
but all that extra yarn was there.
Wondering where on earth to go.
What river would welcome delinquent threads?