When I saunter past the Victorian
of my 1960’s upbringing
past the bay-windowed chamber
from which I viewed the street,
past the maples twice its height
posted either side sentry,
spot the Girl Scout in sash
seated on the porch swing
 
I imagine she might listen
to NPR like I did,
write dramas in the secret nook
under the stairs,
race from pie to hopscotch
before twilight’s curtain.
Where are they all now -
 
those girls who followed me
in the generations after, 
who played Chinese Checkers,
dunked Oreos in milk mugs,
drew with Cray-Pas after school?
So many childhoods that happened
in this same house as mine did
 
and I don’t know who they are
nor what memories they wear,
but our hair tangles together;
we bang elbows and knees;
our ghost shoulders rub
 
when in sleep we roll over
to our going-home dreams
                        

So much a homebody
that if I spend two whole days
going no farther than what I can see
from my 3rd story window,
I feel like I’ve accomplished something.
When I flew across the Atlantic,
I was jealous of the bus driver
navigating Edinburgh traffic
because he had his routine.
When somebody tells me they are off
to Palm Springs or Manhattan 
for the weekend,
of course it sounds la-di-da to me
the way cruises and vodka gimlets do
 
but I’m content to watch snow melt
into muddy rivulets off my own patio,
arms of burr oaks stretching patiently
towards spring, a slice of buttered toast
waiting on the kitchen counter.
It’s one reason I hop a plane: for that
moment I board one heading back,
and it finally dips and lowers
towards my adopted town.
                        

Not something I suspected,
just a fact I stumbled on half-
a-decade into our often-daily
trade of schemes, ideas, notions,
a cascade of updates, then weighty
reconsiderations; we, co-conspirators
bouncing words for the stage, the page,
the podium forth and back till they launched
themselves.  If a gap in age existed
 
it was no consequence, not like
in childhood when alliances were forged
only if you shared the same grade.
But now I know you are the age neither
of my grandfathers made it to, both of them
sinewy shadows in final photographs taken
shortly after I was born which means what
we have is a luxury – but not one to squander
 
for we are both in those years when
the drawbridge starts to lift, the rope tighten,
and dusk continually flips to dawn quickly,
then quicker like a child’s deck of wooden
slats attached with ribbon clacking together
towards the ground, end over end.