Altogether Elsewhere

Tess Taylor

They multiply, these cities of the heart,

these rooms we lodge our bodies in.

Brief beds: one California night

I swam between the humpbacked coastal ranges

and woke Scotch-tinged, wet, newly dreaming

to smokestacks and sharp dawn in Queens.

Light split the branches of fresh trees.

A stage-set life implied itself from props.

Now morning— pigeon flocks, construction sites,

a Western freeway's glint, a garden filled

with verbena, sage, my childhood light—

this midsummer, too, will go so soon.

O unfinishable homes: You each feel so real so briefly.

I feel you incomplete me, incompletely.