WITCHWOOD, part 2

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SKELETON KEY

You collect them. One was stolen from a neighborhood

house empty of all traces of its previous owners except

the crystal knob on the hallway door and the thin

iron key. Whoever bought the house wouldn’t care

about the lives lived in it before, or the echoes of footfall

or the way long shadows took on the shapes of those

who no longer sit at the tables or gaze out the windows. You

wear the stolen key sometimes on a black cord. Strange

adornment, tattoo of some other life you can’t recall

but also can’t set down. Someone must carry the dead, otherwise

we live in overpriced apartments on desirable streets,

built on rebar and scaffolding, oblivious to what lies

below. We live on farms fallen fallow or over cemeteries

or the catacombs of Paris where tourists stroll along corridors

of bones. After you see a thousand human skulls, or maybe

just a hundred, they lose their macabre intrigue. You could hold one

in your hands and barely think of how we’ll all meet

the same outcome. Then the furniture will be hauled out

to the street, the empty closet locked with a one-of-a kind

key — clavical, phalange, metatarsal, cervical rib —

a thing that could be so easily misplaced.