Two houses up, old Eddie died last week
and a man I’ve never seen before
is throwing things into the garden
from the back door: a cardboard box, black plastic bags,
a broken kitchen chair.
The garden isn’t much, but Eddie had laid a path,
hollowed a goldfish pond, sown
a rockery with alpine flowers,
and, down the garden’s end, curved
a white concrete arch
balanced on red brick piles,
a sort of giant cartoon magnet
that only town foxes step through
from the nettle patch that Eddie left
‘for luck, for butterflies’.
