Idyll by Michael Hofmann

Found in Selected Poems Michael Hofmann

The windows will reflect harder, blacker, then before,
and fresh cracks will appear in the yellow brick.

There is no milkman or paper boy, but presumably
the lurid pizza flyers and brassy offers of loans

will continue to drop through the letter box.
The utilities will be turned off one by one,

As the standing orders keel over or lose their address,
though there was never much cooking or bathing or

Phoning went on here anyway - the fridge will stop its buzz,
the boiler  its spontaneous combusting - till there is nothing

But the mustiness of gas. The dust will coil and thicken
ultimately to hawsers around pipes and wires;

Ever more elaborate spiders' webs will sheet off the corners;
rust stains and mildew and rot will spread chromatically

Below the holes in the roof, radiate from the raiators;
eventually mosses and small grasses and even admirable

wild flowers, hell and elder or buddleia, push their heads
through the chinks between the boards; a useless volume of books -

Who could ever read that many - will keep the moths entertained
generations of industrious woodlice and silverfish

Will leave their corpses in the clarty work-surfaces,
and a pigeon or two will hook its feet over the tarnished sink

And brood vacantly on its queenly pink toes.