The last

Thumbing through Harrison’s “Selected Poems”
I’m reminded there’s a last somewhere downstairs; in the coal-house at a guess.

Most homes had one once, and not so long ago.
I remember belting segs into heels.

Maybe I’ll dig it out tomorrow from among the tools and flattened shoes and spiders’ webs. Use it as a doorstop, just like Harrison.

Commemorating something gone for good: the self-sufficient lives of parents, grandparents with time and need to make and mend.

Metered by a ticking clock: minutes, hours, days, the sun stepping through degrees; compressed now into history, irrelevant, as though they’d never lived at all.

Somebody will tell me it’s a trip hazard. Public liability will be invoked by well-intentioned visitors. Risk assessments reassessed.

I expect it went out years ago. I might have taken it myself; buried it in a different shed.

Tomorrow is another day. Some things are better undisturbed.