By winter, I had made it out west.
Sludge-filled subways in
rear views of dreams, but I
never wrote them down when I woke —
why should I: in real life, I
didn’t drive.
For two straight winters, the rains.
I asked the poems what it meant
and they laughed themselves blue,
blew beyond my reach.
Geese in the graveyard grazing
newborn grass of old haunts.
Prescient, pregnant mists before
the storms, and then the storms.
I traced the path with my back
to the tombstones. Tire-swallowing
sidewalk seas. Let it rain in ways
promiscuous, rain in ways of old.
I asked what you knew of this,
this wetness, and I asked so you knew
you could tell me. But you choked.
Coward, you coward, you choked.
Deluges drenching jacarandas were
ancient, cyclic, maybe vaguely French.
February’s waterlogged perfume
pried me Proust-like from
the present, left me languishing
in a front porch past life.
O oil-slicked highway, you whore,
embrace me once again. I tried comparing
this place to a postcard, but nobody
caught the confession. I asked the poem how
many rivers would stain me — it sighed, said it
thought I knew better. The answer doesn’t matter.
I don’t drive, but I know when to grab a wheel, and
anyway: this will always be somewhere
I will one day leave.
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