213

Everybody smiles ten years later
when they see each other in a city street

Pictures of the people who are important now
stashed in their wallets in their pockets in their
brown leather bags

Even you'll smile at me
then when I don't need it anymore

I look up when I hear the door,
but you just drop off your things and go back out it again.

212

You live at a rest stop along the highway.
No one watched your house
get built.

And the books about the people
who no one understands
are never about you.

At night the workers at the gas station
drive by on their way home
to their wives.

211

When I'm lucky I run into myself
on the street. She looks older in
different clothes from the ones
I fell asleep in.

She looks more or less like the others
on the street and her voice
doesn't ring in my ears.

I can't hear what she's thinking
and she stops to scratch her ankle with
the bottom of her other shoe.

The first thing when I wake up
where you've never been, I roll over
to the other side that's also mine.

210

When I got home in the morning
the lights were still on in the living room.
You car was in the driveway
and I've never seen a cab around here.

It's like you knew I hadn't brought you
wherever it was I went
the night before.

209

I don't say much when I come with you
to the supermarket but you
like it when I'm there and I
sometimes like it too

The bright lights off the yellow tiles
and sounds of only high pitched wheels

I guess it gets done faster when I'm pushing
the cart but then you stop
and laugh at the cover of a magazine.
A celebrity mugshot or something and I can see you
looking at me

208

Come with me under the leaves
of the trees on the mountains
you can see from the highway.

No one's going to tell us how to get there,
we'll just have to park the car
and walk.

There's no reason to go except
there's not reason to go
and that the people on the highway
are wondering what's in there.

207

After America nothing else
was left. You can discover
a handsome creek as you hike through the woods-
a quaint street fair in the town
that you were passing through. Your great grandmother's
immigration papers. A smile on a child.

But they took the last continent. The last secret
piece of earth. The rest of what was left
for us by whatever left us things.

So let's attach some wires and mix
some chemicals and see what happens
when we love our kids.

Take what we make and sit on a couch
with a map of the world and our
bodies and wonder where to look next.