What shall I say of Henry, who patrolled
the privileged streets of Boulder with battered guitar,
loud hoarse voice and injured hands?
I’d stand mornings in his crowd until he smiled.
His eyes were unthawed blue that struck
like lightning to the gut. He built houses in the boom
until his fingers tingled and went numb.
Then he paid the rent by hitting that guitar.
He said the women who heard and stopped to listen
liked everything about him but himself.
I’m pretty sure he meant me too.
Now Boulder spits me out when I go back,
I can’t climb its mountains or breathe its air.
I ask my last friend living there,
have you seen Henry, have you seen Henry,
but he hasn’t, he hardly knows who Henry is.

She brought, mainly, misery and regret:
at first a baby bird gasping to be fed,
then tearing out your liver every night
for the crime of having discovered her.
By day in that strange landscape your step
shook the earth so it cried out and split.
The unfillable chasm grew wider with warm rain,
pulling down animals, houses, trees.
You left the sinkhole unmarked, found yourself
sweating with relief, at the supermarket
choosing apples; watching TV; tapping
the calculator with a pencil. Still,
you watch sun swim through her blue glass, or,
lighting a candle you bought for her,
study the small flame until your eyes
will let in no more light. Her laugh was like water
and the books tell her name. After all you did to please her,
you fold singly into your life. You can’t see
her gifts and losses in the same frame;
everything’s better, and something’s gone.

What if, instead of ordering takeout for your friends,
sitting around the table for guy talk and microbrew,
while I’m out tonight you took the evening to pack
so I’d come home to find the archetypes of loss:
unshirted hangers in half the closet, empty drawers
gaping naked as new. How faithfully I trust the world
to return you to me when I return, cranky from the cold
and stamping snow from my boots.
Everything but you teaches disappointment and attrition.
Everything else moves endlessly away from heat.
Even as I imagine it, I can’t imagine it: posters
stripped from the walls, computerless printer dangling cables,
the red-and-yellow tulips you gave me opened flat as hands
and spilling their black stamens on the scrubbed table.

I think she asks me to come back
to see how gracelessly I can respond,
this old friend who stayed here
while I went and did whatever I’ve done.
Her four kids put their arms
around my neck and call me aunt.
Our history predates everything
but family; I know her from before
we decided who to be. Years of pictures
map our many hairstyles:
feathered and sprayed at fifteen,
spiked at twenty, bobbed at thirty.
In this town every rebellious cell
in me remembers scenes I never made,
having stoned sex in a pickup truck, or
splattering the pretty storefronts
with pressurized rage.
Now she nurses the youngest
while I pour juice for the rest
in her house big enough for all of them.
Her kids are calling to be held.
I’m holding them.
I’ll never move back here.

I cried from joy at the movie about the Nile
in one of those dome-screen theaters where the shows
are all fifty minutes long and full of landscape
and swelling music, the other children
scattered like shells down the long row next to me.
Julia jumped in her seat, got up to leave once
and was put back. “Are we moving?” she whispered.
I told her no but I wasn’t sure

since I was in my dream of flying, but wide awake
and with someone I loved, as in the pictures of Heaven
I drew during Art, with all my friends dancing on cloud floors
and climbing cloud mountains. There I was, rushing
past cliffs and over water, music everywhere
and no fear because I will only bounce
and I can do this whenever I want.

But I don’t know how to have that dream,
I don’t know how they make those movies,
and when it was over Julia held my hand
and we walked up the dome to blink in the light.