ALEXANDRIA QUARTERLY

HARVEST

Tin cans
left on roadside shacks
fill with change,
quarters for sweet corn.
Green afternoons,
farmers ride down
the bleached town roads
on tractors.
Cars collect,
one by one,
behind a harvest
of days.

CATCHING UP

You chased your imagination west,
through waitressing
and Hollywood,
onto red carpets
where pretty people
get their pictures taken.
You say you visited
the Paris café
where Sartre wrote
and philosophized.
You say you’ll be back in town Thanksgiving.
And I say all the old haunts are tired,
their small places of certainty
filled with a faint sense of loss.