Childhood is a small town in Labyrinth County
with brothers and sisters and cousins, big-kid games
beyond the porch. Grandfolks sending you off into the fray.
Heather with her wavy hair, bellbottoms and confident wiles,
held the key to the perfect girl, unlocking boys
she could take and own. Me, little cousin
with doe eyes for such starlings who could perch
in the middle of cross streets, in the palm of the world.
With the eyes of heirs, she was witness to the secret
map of her life, the way in, the way out, the whole ranch.
Soon she was riding with the older kids
in cars I could not catch. Too fast and far ahead,
they would not be followed by me anymore.

In a few years I stepped off the porch myself
onto unfamiliar streets, out of this town and the next,
cobbled together my own grid of streets, stood at the outskirts
to find the plains are an open field without a road or sign.
And because the earth is round, all streets circle back
to this town decades later, past cemeteries
and emptied-out gas stations. Why are they thin
and pale and I am fat with the dew of the apple?
What do I know?

I have become tired of my speculating
on how we all arrived: Heather is wilted and dry
from years in a window. I try to tell the story
about Heather in the palm of it, all the roads
that followed Heather. Her schemes, her dreams,
the labyrinth of grass,
the labyrinth of cockamamie,
the labyrinth of unfortunate results.
And here nobody had the treasure.
Nobody found the buried key.
Nobody found the directions behind the directions.
If they had waited, looked me in the face and asked me,
could I have told them what I have found?

No, you can’t follow anymore around these streets,
the future is a myth and times a **** shame everywhere.

Do the dead who love us know?