Wyndcliff, Rhinebeck, NY, 197-,

Drusilla drifts along
The rotting beams
Like thistledown
In her long dress
Three stories up
In a house where
Edith Wharton
Once stayed
And wrote.
Its gossamer
Curtained
Windows
Are broken
As are all
Its hallways
Floors
And
Doors.
Her lover
Far away
In pursuit
Of a black mirage
Why should
Drusilla care?
He'll catch
His vision
Eat it,
And return.
For now
Drusilla silently
Pirouettes-
Barefoot
Across broken
Floors where
Ivy has taken root
among
The dark red bricks
And a piano
Slowly dies-
Its voice silent.
She finds mirrors
In this towered
House where
Wharton once wrote
In and of,
Breaking them
As she finds them
Because mirrors lie
She exists
But they won't
Show Drusilla
Her face
When they show
Her the ghosts
That live in them.
She breaks these
Old and tarnished
Mirrors,
Freeing
The ghosts that
Live in them.
Surrounded
By ghosts
And holding
Miss Edith
On her lap,
Drusilla
Combs her long
Dark hair
Up on a tower
Windowsill
Where there is
No floor
Three stories up
Against the moon
Like an autumn leaf
Suspended in
A cobweb
Across one of
Her broken mirrors
Drusilla braids it
For bed
Beneath the house
That slowly fades
Into the landscape
Among the
Bare trees
Brick by brick
Broken window
By broken window
Candlesticks
And burned out wicks
Shattered mirrors
And
Window
Sashes.

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Author's Note: Wyndcliff is real. It was built near the town of Rhinebeck, NY in 1852 by Mrs. Elizabeth Schernerhorn Jones, a cousin to the Astors, and was so splendid that it generated the phrase "Keeping up with the Jonses". Abandoned since the 1950s, it stands in isolated, rotting splendor, the rooms where Edith Wharton once wrote now open to the sky.