Getting Somewhere

If you live long enough, you might arrive
at a place which has no name on Earth
maps.  And your arrival will be haunted
by a familiar but unexpected sense
of belonging, to the future, that wilderness
of guesses (except, of course, for death
though death has its own little clutch
of maybes) and to the past, which is not entire
-ly gone, but can be accessed through an immense
Museum of unreliable detail.  A day
goes by, and another, and another.  Things
to be done pile up behind you.  You save them
for tomorrow.  You have dreams
that remind you of other things you don’t know
you’ve already forgotten and replaced
with fictions based on a true story
and when summer comes, you surprise yourself
by walking, all the way to the river, and all the way back. 

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George Amabile has published in The New Yorker, Poetry (Chicago), American Poetry Review, Botteghe Oscure, The Globe and Mail, The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse, Saturday Night, Poetry Australia, Sur (Buenos Aires), Poetry Canada Review, and Canadian Literature.