city, like a lover in poetry

it is one thing to see a big city
a legendary city, a storied city
one of the centres of the universe
growing smaller in your rear-view
towers of light shrinking fading
blurring with motion and distance
new york, vegas, angeles, whatever
to know that you are shifting too
parallax as your tail lights fade
from the obliviously frantic into
some other frantic oblivion yet
smaller and more tired and also
somewhere one can breath freer
heal the bodies and the minds
prepare for another round there
just a sabbatical from that
thrumming power of being
somewhere that counts
before you return

it is another thing entirely
to have the lights reflected
be of a little place itself
a couple flashing yellow yields
a closed McDonalds drive-thru
two gas stations and a diner
a tiny place called Herkimer
Fultonville Mojave Rhinelander
towns just big enough to even
be called a proper town at all
and still
the mirror tells you that you’re
leaving even that level of sphere
the frontier outpost behind you
going off to nowhere or at least
into the space between that tiny
place and some other tiny place
just enough receding light
in the glass to know that
you ever existed at all

I am from a place so small
Little Falls
so small they put “little”
right in the goddamn name
I am there again and
I don’t know when a city will
take me like a lover back
I don’t know if a city will
take me like a lover back
I don’t know if fading lights
will return to me at all
or if it will just keep dimming
away away away
while I am frozen in nostalgia