Inventory of a Vacant Lot

Between the laundromat and the boarded church, a square of weeds keeps its own ledger: chicory, ragweed, the thistle's purple coin, a bottlecap pressed flat as a sacrament.

The chain-link sags where children have climbed it for thirty summers, each rusted diamond a window onto nothing in particular — goldenrod, a tire, the slow argument of ants moving sugar from somewhere to somewhere else.

A pigeon balances on the rebar that once meant stairs. The wind turns a plastic bag into a small ghost, then loses interest. Across the avenue, a radio insists on a song from before I was born.

I have come here to be unaccounted for, to stand among the unnamed inheritances — the cracked foundation breathing its long exhale, the volunteer maple raising its green indifferent flag above the bricks.

Even ruin is a kind of tending. Even the abandoned keeps its appointments with light, with rain, with whatever chooses to root in the space where someone, once, intended a wall.