We crouch beneath eaves, lean on a railing, do things barefoot in
the sprinklers at night, tap out our pipe and empty it. Maybe we
run our palm over the buzz-grass of a putting green and think:
minutia. Maybe we leave everything for Europe. I leave again for
Paris by way of my mother now in DC. I don’t know what to
believe. Torn awake on the couch that night I think: This is how
losing your place happens. That night, locked out in a storm, I
believe in the chaos of liminal spaces, I see how it rains most just
below the eaves. Transition is a mind state. There must be more.
I cannot stop leaving. Let the last letters be scattered
here, let my mind move like a strip mine. Leave it bare. Bring it
elsewhere, put it up, forget it. Pour some coffee. Return home.
Stand by lakes. Find work. Call in. Go away. Get out of town.
So, I go. Blue highway, car-silence. Everywhere
corrugated steel covers bare spots in structures in
‘unincorporated’ places: Coldspirit, Blackwater, North Superior
East, Mann, Old Snake. Each one American, unpeopled.
Though cats pace there, barn to shattered hay-roll, hole to hole in
house walls, curating nothing, like the stewards of ghosts.
Unincorporated. Snowmelt, wind & water, tasteless. Early
November, contrails grate the air—pull the car to the side—their
compositions, modern. I’m returning now, home. Every
streetlight out but three, my street. An ellipsis. The
sky makes a million shadows of itself as snow, remassing as a
solid, low form below. I find an old journal, my mother’s
handwriting: My son, you now grow intimately in my womb.