My Landlord Left a Poem in the Flat I Was Renting
He'd been dead six months. The poem was for whoever came next.
The flat was small and cheap and on the third floor, and the landlord had been a poet. I didn't know this when I moved in. I found out when I opened the drawer of the desk that came with the flat and found a single sheet of paper, folded twice, with a poem typed on it.
It was not a good poem. It was a little sentimental and a little too fond of its own metaphor. But it was about the flat, about the way the light came through the east window in the morning, about the sound the stairs made when someone came home late. It was about the place I was now living, and it had been left there on purpose, for the next tenant.
The letting agent told me the landlord had died six months before I moved in. He had owned the flat for forty years and he had lived in it himself for the last ten, and when he died the family had emptied it and put it back on the market. They had left the desk, and the poem, and a few other things that were too heavy or too strange to take.
I read the poem a dozen times. I read it standing in the east window in the morning, and I read it listening to the stairs at night, and I understood that the poem was not just about the flat. It was a letter. It was the landlord saying 'I lived here too, and this is what I noticed, and now it is yours to notice'.
I wrote a poem back. I left it in the same drawer, folded the same way, for the next tenant. I don't know if anyone will find it. I don't know if they will read it or keep it or add to it. But the drawer is now a kind of library, a shelf of two poems about the same small flat, a conversation between two strangers who will never meet.
I still live there. The east window still does what he said it did. The stairs still make the same sound. And the poem is still in the drawer, waiting for whoever comes next, the way a poem should be.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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