Lysistrata Dreaming

Not one of your death wish missions
into another war torn land. This is mine:

a summer night dream, sweaty
without covers. The things we used to do

together—drink, run, get naked
in waterfalls, have sex, smoke years later—I don’t do

anymore. A Greek island, Southern Portugal, somewhere
in the middle

of Connecticut. The unconscious doesn’t bother
with these details. Do you want me

to break my vows? You have some of your own.
You were never really free. I might break

down inside this scene if
I could see the right water

fall after dark—no Mississippi River icon,
Niagara Falls, Icelandic wonder, rain playing blues

harp on a Cape Cod cottage roof. No.
Would need to be off

a back road near no one
and nothing left at all before I wake.

Leaving Hoosierland

A moving walkway is coming to an end, begin
here where passing through
is an industry. Will I speak
to strangers, you ask no one. I will
not use horizontal escalators
to get what I want, you state

plainly—rural routes
delineate a grid
unlike any you know now.
You remember how you did the leaving,
a wave from the way back window in the red
Chrysler wood-paneled station wagon

as your mother pumped the gas pedal hard
and away. East to Ohio was never enough. Farther still,

New Jersey, New York, Connecticut,
a town in Southern Portugal. An absence
for something, did you ever know, you ask. Some day you will
believe in the pedal steel
player’s sticker on an instrument he plays
that night in Indianapolis:

“Non-judgment day is near.”