portrait of a burglary, in verse

Popped my head
into the past (the future?)
today

an interesting place to be
that bed
those walls
Les Fleurs du Mal...
(do I know this strange, strange place?)

I'm a cat burglar into a life
of a girl
who seems infinitely familiar and, yet,
somehow
strange, different

someone from another time--
so young,
with yellow light falling out of the September sky onto her
hair
as she glimmers with hope, promise, and a new BA so shiny it reflects light
like a perfect copper penny

but where's the girl?
I can't seem to find her anywhere as I
sleep in her bed
drive her car
hug her parents
barhop with her girls
walk her steps,
from one sunlit patch to another;
a thoughtful cat
searching for a warm, comfortable spot to rest

funny, though,
they all seem to know me,
these people...
"how tan you've gotten!"
"have you lost weight?"

the voices drift to me
as though from a great distance,
muffled, echoy, and yet
somehow beautiful

do they know me?
am I deceived?
have I tricked even myself into living
as this girl,
that faraway sun-dappled idealist who left on a jet plane
(don't know when she'll be back again)
one September morning
to a far distance freckle on the face of the vast, smiling Pacific,
never to be seen again?

I see her at a distance, too--
in a dream--
you know, the bright overexposed kind--
random shots strung together
into some kind of sorry semblance
of a whole
(and then, on waking, you scramble to arrange all the pieces of the puzzle before they disappear in a beautiful oblivion)?

as I drive these familiar paths,
pathways light along my mind:
now she's playing Capture the Flag on a long shag carpet of green, flanked by cars on either side
(6th Avenue Parkway),
grinning mischievously and loving life

girl moves to new house
(what is this strange, strange place?)
and then--get this!--hides from her new babysitter under the dining room table,
clinging desperately to the vain hope that hiding from the change will prevent it,
eyes shut tight in earnest anticipation of the longed-for metamorphosis into yesterday

first day at school:
so many buses;
they're all the same--
yellow, yellow--she's drowning in a sea of familiar strangeness,
gasping for air till she's found (saved!) by Principal K--
he may chain-smoke, but he delivers little one safely home

and oh there's more--
braces, glasses, learning to drive...
learning to drink (or not)
graduation, promise,
manifest destiny

then she was off to great places,
up up and away away
AWAY
out of her cocoon and into The World (look out!)

and so the South, the North, the Continent--
all got a liberal taste of Colorado sunshine in the form
of that bright creature (was she real or apparition?) who floted
(mostly) easily
between among through
them,
touching lightly upon all she encountered

and yet this is her place,
the girl,
nothing on earth--Paris, NYC, Timbuktu--
quite tunes her soul to perfect pitch
the way this view does,
right here, right now,

as I drive back into Denver from the mountains
as twilight gently enwraps that smoggy little metropolis she calls home
and I watch the gradual changes
as I fly up up up
and down the hill,
into that welcoming bosom of city light
nestled between the warm dark mountains on both sides and then spreading,
unfolding its glorious, languorous self
as far as the eye can see

and she (and I) involuntarily inhale
as we catch sight of it cresting the hill,
hold tightly onto its
perfection

and in that crystalline moment
it's clear where the girl I burgled is.
not in North Carolina or New York or lost in Europe or on some distant tropical isle

that young idealist,
the sun-dappled smiling hippie,
she lives in that same secret place that contains this view--
that deeply hidden spot in the soul
which no one or nothing can tug
in quite the way this moment can.

and as the car and her mind and the world
hurtle onward forward
through the space time continuum
(even here, back in the future)
everything settles.

I am home.