There.
I stand and look about me.
Now everything is all around me.
I see exactly where I am.
I stand and face the north, where the city
lies before me.
I face the east to see the sea repeatedly stand and bow.
I look farther east to the last wild night
a woman had me in her arms,
hear that foreign city call me back to her.
I look to the south, that road we rolled along,
the road to my sister.
Our mystery lost to history.
I sit and look closer.
The sunlight burns on the painting.
The walls are fading.
This place, so airy and bright,
remains weighted with the fresh ghosts
of men before me, two men
sequentially growing up, growing sick,
here in this room.
Two men in different times,
passing through this door
and staying, moving into this house.
Dying here in this room.
Lying down right here in this bed.
From where they are now, my here is
there.
I stand again, look west.
The impossible trip back across Pennsylvania.
An aged couple waiting. I can picture them arm in arm.
Every gesture heroic.
They can see everything.
We all look farther west and I
confess my arrangements.
They wave me off as the plane
poses as a question and takes off.
In the airplane the world below me turns
into the sky.
Still everything is all around me.
This constant up-and-over of travel
stays with me as I go, along with
the silent sleepy weightlessness
of waking up at home.
I do not move through the world filling voids.
The world shifts itself around me.
The plants on the window sills
stand majestic in their own wild order.
The water rushes down the pipes.
I stand and watch the curtains put their shadows
on the windows.
I look in the mirror there and turn.
The wind picks up and
laughs running down the street
dodging traffic and
gasping in the cold.
I remember
we were greedy stuffing
our pockets full of colorful money.
I balanced a book
in my hand.
I too take off running,
dodge the neighbors in their places
and dispense with neighborly ways,
push
my friends
from open spaces
to not explain
my project’s aim.
Even as I hurry past the stores and races
busses break the crosswalks
and I run with dogs
and children to play.
I rip my torn philosophy
further through its middle,
deposit it in the bank.
Poor and wild, I
stoop to pray and praise.
All this preparation is like
a dream, and I turn
waking and running and spilling over.
The wind keeps up
and races me
through wildernesses.
It’s fun to laugh at
the wonder and disarray left in our wake,
the patterns burned into
our tracks. Don’t we feel alive when
the others follow?
They wonder
where we’re
off to—
to find the other end of the unspooling thread.