This Past Wednesday

We lived briefly outside and at once

all of our one lives one innocuous evening.

I think it must’ve been a round ten.

We’d gone, really and already, in every sense,

a-stoop-smoking to clear the air of Murakami

and his personal identity. I guess we knew

we’d end up breathing significantly

before time came to shepherd us back in.

On the stoop, aglow in rosewood smoke,

in the streaked light of our chosen nostalgia

and strawberry hope, we pointed to things

we really saw—everything—pressing their

dimensions sharp through the buttery plaster

of our personal identities, like certain words

I happened to glimpse, in and out of Murakami.

I was startled when a car cut through the viscous

street in front of me like a hand underneath a piece

of cloth. It bent still shadows around a perfect

globule of movement and returned each to rest

only after each of its past moments had passed.

That’s when I saw my smoke trail slowly leave me,

unapologetically, heading across the invisible prairie

on its horses to drink by the bending river in the street.

It asked me if I knew, now, why I should come along.

I pointed and asked: What was that I just saw?

Where?

There by the street. What was that?

Oh, that was just

antlers on a fire truck this past Wednesday.

I don’t understand.

Of course you don’t. You won’t remember I said it.

Then why’d you say it?

To remind you you’ll forget.

Oh, I see. Thank you, then. I was about to

forget I’d forget. Now I know

I never will.