Tilt

Parking against the bushes,
she leaves the drive clear
to the garage: three years
since she took away his keys,
a year since she sold the Sierra
he parked behind the door,
half a year since he moved
to that long corridor, “the Meadows,”
where his mind wanders,
and for the first time in nearly
six decades he sleeps alone.

Out the front picture window
of the house he left behind
the three great leafless branches
of a single flowering crab grow east,
away from the scar to the west
at the center of a swell of earth
where the second crab was set,
the shaded one, twelve feet
from the mate – into which it spread
for 57 years and, taken out,
left tilted away from nothing visible.