Page 6 of Wayfarers

he said, you know your mom would

buy you the van and just like that, my escape,

the place I went to in my head

became everyone else’s clubhouse. I should have

said no, should’ve kept them out, but back then

I was bad at that. (Back then?) Cal asked me for it

and so I made it happen and immediately the dream

no longer belonged to me. And Cal

left me too. Or I left him,

if what I did was a kind of leaving. A kind

of shearing off your soul. Middle of the night

my wheels turning, and I—

well. This

is the stuff I think about now, driving I-55 at dawn,

charging gas to my mom’s Amex, asking myself

each morning, Why am I here? Asking

myself, How did I end up so alone? The windshield

wipers chasing each other, the cornfields

bristling against the freeway, my heart lurching away

at both the visible and invisible dangers, asking myself again,

again: Where on earth do I go next?

Knox My True Name

We moved as wind; we moved

as water; we came and went

like deer picking clean a field at dusk. We lived

in the unseen margins. We slipped through

the cracks in walls and keyholes

of memoryless cities like smoke.

They told me we were reaching

for something pure and so I reached.