Among late summer’s casualties,
their dry retreats, their whispering
in falls and drifting piles of leaves,
her going went the worst for him
with foxgloves where wire fencing sags,
a sozzled hollyhock’s nosedive,
the foxes’ feast of ripped bin bags
anemones somehow survive;
entangled heaps of splintered canes,
their broken-backed tomato plants
and, rattled by what heat remains,
a poppy head’s ghost of a chance
that she might, with no more to save
from his neglect than spores and seeds,
steal back in March to nod and wave
red-handed through next summer’s weeds.
