estate sale

while you look at chairs on the porch 
i stand in the yard
beneath an apple tree burdened with 
so much fruit. the street is usually quiet
& a neighbor smokes barefoot 
in his front yard, making sure none of
the visitors park on the grass. 
another neighbor is on the phone.
she's saying, "there's just so many people.
they just keep coming."
you love estate sales. they overwhelm me. 
so much emotion. the frenzy of the visitors 
& the ghosts of an emptying house. 
i try to imagine the place before
its final dissection. this one was feels special
because a gay couple lived here.
their queerness sewn into the bookshelves 
& the collections of paintings. fish 
& men & trees & birds. strings of shells.
a little bin beneath the bed with stage makeup.
feather headpieces. did he do drag? just liked
to entertain? in the basement a leak soaks
the floor. a woman shoulders past me
to get a look at a pile of frames.
in the corner i find a stack of porn tapes
like an altar. were they shared between husbands
or did they just belong to one of them? 
you pick out a cowboy hat & a leather working tool.
a painting of trout. i find an alice b toklas cook book
laying, wings spread open, on the kitchen floor. 
standing in line to pay for our fragments
i imagine the dining room set for guests.
knocking on their door & telling them
we are family even though we do not know each other.
i guess i am not sure what kind of gays 
they were. maybe they would find us strange
or maybe they would show us
their paintings. tell us the stories of where
the shells & the earrings & the mirrors are from. 
maybe there would be a bowl of apples 
on the dining room table plucked from
the tree in the yard, arms not weighed down
by the so much fruit. in the car 
on the way home i regret not buying
all the porn tapes. i would have no use for them
but who else there was going to steward them?
i could have kept them for decades. let them fade
even more from the sun. leave them in a little pile
so that one day when an estate sale finally
finds this place we dwell, that another wandering queer
might find them & take them home
with no use for them.