Tanka
a homeless woman
cadging quarters
so that she can spend
the night in the laundromat
pretending to do laundry
left brain,
right brain—
what I really
need to understand
are the hemispheres
of the human heart
my
fourteenth year
without television—
once again
my coworkers laugh
at what I didn't see
walking
after midnight
searching
for poems
to take home
meeting
a truck driver from
Tilden, Mississippi,
in Wal-mart . . .
small towns in a big world
s l o w i n g
down, waiting for
the proof
the nurse's stethoscope
"she's gone"
for the past
week
the birds have been
telling me
"spring is near"
today, the green smell of dawn
old man—
the gleam in his eye
just the light
reflecting off
his bifocals
making lunch
out of an appetizer,
my daughter and I talk
about the road trip
we're going to take . . . some day
you can find
everything at Wal-mart . . .
maybe that's where
I'll find myself
a new lover
a phone bill
with a series of
one minute calls . . .
is my life really
so easy to summarize?
another day
without a sky,
measured
by the punch
of the timeclock
late to
work
by a few poems
on a spring
day in
Maryland
at
the far end
of Turkey Point,
my daughter plays
every tune in
the ocarina songbook
benches built
by an Eagle Scout—
every one named
for a virtue, but not one
named for the wild places
