It’s Very Clear I Never Left

When I’m somewhere I can’t recognize,
like this path with dried brush
everywhere and summer pines,
just shifting in the cloudy wind
before rain begins,
I try to take my time
with it.

How could this gray horizon
and these leafless trees
with little plastic knots tied
all among them not remind me
of my heavy legs
just trying to touch ground again,
I balance on the solid dirt
and fulfill the inner prophecy
of forward.

It takes me back out to the Westside
and it’s very clear I never left the city.
All those trees and dirt were stage props
put there by the local council,
so we’d have somewhere we could
walk around that wasn’t so,
symmetrical and loud.

It’s another evening
in a memory of a summer,
and the nostalgia creeps
all over me like ivy
up the bright side of a building.
It takes longer to remember now,
but I do,
I beg a cardinal with a fist of seeds
to stay longer in this neighborhood
where people can’t buy smokes
but manage anyway.

I am running along the the flat top
of a brick fence between some seven
yards and broken stretch of roadside,
and just like that there is no line between
the memory, and all that’s somehow
left of me.