11-07-2023, 10:37 PM
Dead Philip built a wall
around his ramshackle house on Avenue C.
He got the stone from the rubble
leftover from the digging of graves
in Austin Memorial Cemetery.
It was burnt orange and white limestone.
Daily he drove his battered silver pickup
to the piles of dirt and rock and filled the truck bed.
It was simply a piled fence
surrounding the house and its yard of pecan trees,
easy to step over
but it was a mystical boundary to him.
In the end, when he quit the post office,
he sold the house.
It was in Hyde Park
a neighborhood being gentrified
transformed from student ghetto
into a place only the rich could afford.
The house was torn down,
but they kept the rock.
and turned it into a carefully squaredÂ
and mortared wall.
They killed the magic in the process.
Philip had to make do with an apartment
and without his walls
the demons overran his psyche.
Four years later, he was gone.
around his ramshackle house on Avenue C.
He got the stone from the rubble
leftover from the digging of graves
in Austin Memorial Cemetery.
It was burnt orange and white limestone.
Daily he drove his battered silver pickup
to the piles of dirt and rock and filled the truck bed.
It was simply a piled fence
surrounding the house and its yard of pecan trees,
easy to step over
but it was a mystical boundary to him.
In the end, when he quit the post office,
he sold the house.
It was in Hyde Park
a neighborhood being gentrified
transformed from student ghetto
into a place only the rich could afford.
The house was torn down,
but they kept the rock.
and turned it into a carefully squaredÂ
and mortared wall.
They killed the magic in the process.
Philip had to make do with an apartment
and without his walls
the demons overran his psyche.
Four years later, he was gone.