NIGHT DRIVE TWENTY-FIVE AND TWENTY-SIX THROUGH TUNNELS OF OAK
Each house
we chose
was us
our clothes
back on
our desire dwindled
to lawn
and dappled shingles
our lives
and love made
antique glass.
Now I drive
that neighborhood
in search of us.
—from Rattle #59, Spring 2018
__________
Jonathan Johnson: “I write poems to more fully occupy my existence. The neighborhood in this slim sonnet is the East Side of Marquette, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Recently—and since I wrote the poem—my wife and I finally bought an old home there. Sometimes, writing late at night behind a high bedroom window, I look out and almost glimpse us driving by twenty years ago, imagining which house might someday be ours. But we’re never there.”
