Going

Uttered in amazement as it pulls up

the drive: “U-haul”, across the backcast

window of your screen, and you agape,

beside the world again, you’ve been

at the tips, the letters rising up

on their miniature springs, the words

bunched and misstrung, hours

steadily munched, you haven’t thought

to fill the boxes, to eat, to wash

what might belong to the house,

as you don’t anymore, the landlord

quietly unsheathing your life from

his things, carting them out, gone.

What remains has no starting

point, a tangle, tumbled, injured,

great swaths of butcher paper,

inexplicable crumple, your things,

not sure that they are, so you leave,

get in your car and go.

But you can’t keep to the line, the speed,

the numbers per hour. Surrounded, too,

and how is it they do, know that you sense

interstice only, glowing seam, its thread white

stretched whiter, you strung between

the cinching, tautening so that something

somewhere can strum, and they hear it

because they’re starting to slow down and

speed up, or where is your foot, your eyes,

the lights are blinking, there, or is it there,

and who snaps the ribbon of road out in front

of you like a sheet in the wind,

and why don’t they feel this, the sickening

belch, car body shoved into yours, the coasting

down behind you, now rain, or is it that the lights

are leering, at you, you know you have to stop, you do

stop, you’re stopped, you are, you are still, in the car,

stopped, then you get out and throw the key

deeply into a netted orchard

GONE