Too Close

I haven't met you yet. I'm out the door,
late for a bus, suitcase spilling open,
disgorging my life so far.

I won't be needing it, but don't know that yet.
Bus driver, go slowly around the bends
of dream so as not to wake me.

But don't fall asleep yourself, no matter how empty
the landscape of childhood seems.
There is dust on the dust

of the past. Through my reflection, I look
out the window onto nothing:
a fence full of tumbleweeds

trying to keep a vast emptiness off empty highway.
The past takes forever to cross. Bus driver,
don't drive so near the river —

or is that an irrigation ditch? Is that thunder
I hear, or engine trouble?
It never rained in the past.

Love, am I on my way to you? It will take years
of nights like this for me to arrive.

Debora Greger
The Paris Review
Number 177
Summer 2006

Copyright © 2006 by the Paris Review.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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