Nowhere

a poem from my collection GHOST PAIN

a

Nowhere

Nowhere, though surely not that at all to the few

obscure figures I see, backlit by the blue

of televisions through grit-strafed windows.

What was that exit I took off I-95?

I didn’t notice. I only needed gas.

I’ve slipped in the credit card,

notched the nozzle’s trigger

in that little grooved gizmo, stood back to listen

as gasoline rushes into my tank,

fuel from who-knows-where.

Everything untouched by human hands.

The oldies radio station thumps through the car door:

I wonder where Sister Suki done gone?

1956, I think.

Back then there were girls who done gone and broke your heart,

or you did and you broke theirs.

But that’s not it.

What can I matter standing here hands-in pockets

Or the Arab clerk behind bulletproof glass

or that tall black woman herding her kids toward her carious Escort?

A Gulf War looms, another. Unmanned bombers.

But that’s not it either. What matters?

Not Buddhism, this.

Not terror.

Something, but inexactly, like wonder.

A trice: no friends, no family, foes.

Nor am I sad or even philosophical.

I suppose if it came to that, I could go into Patsy’s Diner

and start the whole thing over.

Now that would be stuff for sadness.

I look, slow and deliberate, toward the four points on any compass.

I’m east and west and north and south of nowhere,

though it’s nearby to my right,

the Connecticut coast, and then the cold Atlantic

Two gulls scrabble over something in Patsy’s lot.

Someone was inside, someone came out

is gone, I wonder where….

How would a person decide?

Did he or she exchange bluff words or cordial,

with some other he or she?

Or only order, pay, leave,

dropping an ort on asphalt for two grizzled birds?

Not desolation. Not the absence

of a still small voice, one crying in this desert,

though I make such a judgment—desert—

only because I am miles,

I am miles and miles from nowhere.

You could feel this way in Salinas, maybe.

You could feel the same in Moose Jaw.

You could just not be a neighbor

in a neighborhood. You could think like me at least of the end

of that ancient r&b song—

it signals that you have a fresh load

of combustible stuff—

as being exactly right, just because “right” is no issue:

I refasten the cap, And that girl—she’s gone to Egypt.