Don't say you're no spring chicken.
Last time someone said that, someone died.

Eighteen months and what I left wasn't mine:
a dwarf lime tree and a fistful of pecans.

Replacement is the cheapest word and all my shortcomings
will fit in there,

seemingly launched and orbiting
for good and at safe distances.

Forget that it is best to keep them close.


*


You're fashioning curtains from sheets,
and the whole house strikes a pose.

Foolish.
It isn't even containing us properly.

We are obviously on our way out.
I go out the door every day

like I am leaving for the last time,
which sounds like staying,

but it's the same as never coming back.


*


You affix yourself to this city
with a library card and it works pretty good.

Somewhere around Wyoming we both felt
the whole eastern mass of the country fall away,

which proves it happened. So we got here
weighing little, wanting less.

Like when you are an airplane
and a chunk of altitudinal ice slides away

and it doesn't matter to you.



*


I am aerodynamic
in that careless, piloted way.

But what I don't know is I'll need that stuff.
There won't be time to search for it later.

And the space between myself and the rest of everything
will be actively felt.

It's very hard to tell if I'm the airplane or the ice
in this situation.

What's left me has its reasons.



*


Only one lime on a tree so small
it bends beneath the weight of its one achievement,

and I keep thinking
Why doesn't someone just pick that lime?

I would be so relieved.
Inanimacy most of all requires our humanity.

We weren't the first to leave behind the pecans.
They were some kid's who went west

And went and left them.