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My Grandmother Conducts the Zener Card Test

By John Grey

The Old Man on His Rounds How malformed the fruit seem,
the plum in my hand
a gutted, blotched mockery
of redness.
Beyond this house,
the garden that gave birth to it
shrieks with the rutting
of rabid foxes.
I place this shriveled thing
against my lips.
The last of my moisture
leaps across old kisses,
relives a tattered kinship
down its rotting skin.
I am as it,
a crone without memory,
creaking through
the morbid shadows
of this ancient family house,
chasing away the last of the light
like old lovers,
holding aloft the dead plum
as the flag
of my state of mind.
Even the garden that bore me
has abandoned my head,
moved out of doors
into the wretched cold.
Between its ragged hedges,
its withering tendrils,
sick foxes impregnate each other
at will.
Meanwhile,
I ask the door-knob why,
when the windows are locked tight,
does the wind get in anyhow?