West of Myself

Why are you still seventeen and drifting like a dog after dark, dragging a shadow you’ve found? Put it back where it belongs, and that bend of river, too. That’s not the road you want, though you have it to yourself. Gone are the cars that crawl to town from the reactors, a parade of insects, metallic, fuming along the one four-lane street. The poplars of the shelterbelt lean away from the bypass that never had much to pass by but coyote and rabbitbrush. Pinpricks stabbed in a map too dark to read— I stared at stars light-years away. Listen. That hissing? Just a sprinkler damping down yesterday until it’s today. The cottonwoods shiver, or I do, every leaf rustling as if it’s the one about to tear itself, not I. Memory takes the graveyard shift.