In a charity shop

Sat behind the counter,

old watches spread,

bracelets, teaspoons

neatly priced,

hunch-huddled,

a child-like smile almost

discernable beneath the map

of her skin, like

an unmade bed.

‘Couldn’t you just sit,’ I ask,

‘and watch the street outside change,

and the people

change, and the weather

change

like friends with time.’

Everything’s easy.

It slips like oil through an engine,

with the occasional stinge

stopping

to rifle through the

pensioner-permeated racks.

She looks up,

thinking aloud like a dream,

‘There are some days,’ she says,

‘when the rails look like

lives clustered into the clothes, some

afternoons when the sun

presses through the dusty window

to fade the colours of the carpet,

and people come in,

binbag-laden

with mum’s blouses,

dad’s old shirts and trousers,

sorry to let them go.’

The pace is always

slow,

charitable,

sad.

‘Yes,’ I thought, ‘nothing ever

changes.’  I wondered

if she’d pictured

her dresses

being brought back here,

her son thinking

‘that’s what she’d’ve wanted’.

Her scarf, her necklace.

That brooch.

Or if she ever

leant back on her stool

and realised that,

really,

she was just passing the time,

that the whole reason she was

sat, hunch-huddled

behind the counter,

was because she had no other cause,

no-one else to spend her days

watching, and so thought she might

hide the fact

in stale jumpers

and behind

shelves of chipped china.

I smiled.  She was right.

The rails were like

lives woven in cloth,

a tapestry,

by which

all that’s left of us

is sold off.