After Traveling

I don’t dream any longer of kneeling in the black dirt by the gateway,
Of waking with grimy hands and dust in my beard,
Of new lilies, new petunias, of smelling dead earthworms,
Of turning over small piles of seeds under the ground,
Wedging bulbs between hard white roots. I dream
Of these street lights, the halogen moving in and out of my eyes,
Haloes that flash and meld before I can see the angel slipping
Into a roadside shack with his wings folded back.

Driving at night, all landscape becomes one
Plain strung with unreliable starlight.
I drove this way to forget that I had a direction,
A destination, to imagine it was all one light glinting, suspended
Above roads I would never map, homes and people I had forgotten.

You, at that dining room table so dimly set with blue velvet
(remembering the first time we ate at that table
How nervous you were, cutting stems so short
The flowers bobbed in their vases, lost)
Eating persimmons cut into quarters with cold fingers,
Puckered mouth and all unmoved dust incandescent.

The memories no longer reach into my spine with electric fingers
To tell me that you breathe, that I no longer live in a home spent
In constant conference with unruly children that tip over the vases,
Make you clean milk from the floor on your knees—you thank them—
close to the ground, you thank them.

Instead, a girl that pulled back the coverlet the same way you did
Without wrinkling the sheets. But she smiled with whiter teeth,
Not your shine and sweat. With my hand on her jaw,
I pretended this was comfort, that she was alive as I was.

Strange to discover that any two bodies will fit together,
That any coverlet will pull back so smoothly
To reveal these pale sheets.

Even here, wet forsythia drips into the highway,
Yellow leaves cling together, translucent in rain—
Spring, despite the chill.