POEM FOR A NEIGHBOR

photograph by rehuxley via Flickr

All summer you have been
pulling in and out
of your nearby driveway,
your flat green car
burrowing in my dreams
like a slug.

You are tall and ordinary
unpacking groceries
from the trunk,
then producing the key
to your dark apartment
while I turned sixty
behind curtains.

All summer I have been
swallowing tea biscuits,
cupcakes, easy listening tunes
on the AM dial and
watching you, my nearest neighbor,
always driving away.

Did I ever tell you
about my husband?
I ask one morning
after you pull out with
a blond woman in your car.

He died in a high hospital room
looking out on the highway
where at night the cars
glow like moving stars.

Did I tell you how he
gave out watching them,
waiting for a crash,
an engine fire--something
to justify his burning?

All summer I have been
watching you, waiting for
the hottest night of the year
when you will open
all your doors and windows,
and I will catch
the strange rays of your TV
rising from the screen and
moving through the space between us
like cars, like meteors,
the mosaic of a common light.

(I wrote this poem on my 27th birthday; apparently I was feeling old.)

first appeared in Tendril
reprinted in the anthology, Yearbook of American Poetry