or minionette vine or mugwort, she didn’t think,
but she knew something was wrong when she began
to blossom into hysteria. A garden overgrown,
bones of a home she’d outgrown, and she could have,
she should have, known- the careless ghosts, the
unbreakable chair, the absence of frantic arcs, swallowed
by morning and never magic. She knew one thing certain,
but it was like the weeds that she didn’t mind so much
taking over her garden, tying knots she’d never untangle-
or she could spend a summer trying, and still, the mugwort
and mignonette vine, would keep growing, mile-a-minute,
then she’d be trapped with night-time regrets hiding
between the folds of her pillows, shaped just like the roses
she could have spent the summer watching, open, close.
What she had known, she kept hidden in the garden
that grew bone-deep behind her eyes, the place in the brain
where dreams are manufactured in that little cabinet
that looks like a seahorse. She knew that she could have,
should have, been there, when she felt the promise of
something magic, a feeling she didn’t realise one day
she’d be unable to recall, and with the feeling went the promise.
She had dreams of traffic accidents, she saw houses rotting
from the inside out, and everything she watched at night
was a spectacle, clearer cut and more colourful than waking.
It made her wonder whether she existed mostly in sleep.
That was a thought she could live with. Because then perhaps
the promise wasn’t real, or if it was, her reality was apart,
and his, perhaps, always had been. Still, even if that were true,
she heard a voice in her dream the night that she heard
about the suicide of her neighbour. It was her own voice,
she thought, but from another place- it was a voice that knew
and was not afraid to know, or to tell her. You could have,
you should have, let him see you, before you gave up on magic.
