Most of what I owned I left
in an alley and loved
how quickly it was gone.
◊
I believed the earth
would grow
so tired of holding
itself still
it would empty
◊
drying into
the paler sky
of the west.
◊
So when I left
Chicago,
it made sense
◊
to leave
on a train
◊
to know exactly
how long it took to leave
one part of the country
◊
to see drought
spread across whole states,
and the places of flood
shining with metal lenses.
◊
Some of that happened. Of course
I slept through all of Nebraska.
◊
I lent a pen
to a PhD student
on his way back to Lincoln
after Pride Weekend.
◊
A man in earbuds played
air drums and returned
to his sketch pad.
◊
Once,
in the evening
before leaving
Iowa
I looked out and
there were at least
one thousand
blackened animals
thin as handwriting
◊
where crops
had drowned in the rain.
◊
Night fell a long time
over the landscape.
It was the night
of clear dreams
and the drought
that kept coming.
The old woman
seated beside me
kept turning
in her sleep
and hooking
her knee over mine.
Max Schleicher is a poet and teacher. He is currently a PhD student at the University of Utah and recently held the position of Wisconsin Poet-in-Residence at Ripon College. His poems have appeared in POETRY, Shenandoah, Mid American Review, and other places. His work has been anthologized in New Poetry from the Midwest.
