Walking through the city,
A city where no one walks,
I see details I don’t know that I ever wanted to see.
Kids walking home from the school by my home
(Will a parent think I’m a pedophile?)
Small and mainly brown
One eyes the ice cream cart
I saw Sunday with Kate.
The man pushing the cart rings a hand-held bell but says nothing.
The mother pulls her son onward.
She is round and waddles more than walks.
She doesn’t see me as I walk.
Her eyes are looking somewhere else
(Home? The Past? Heaven?)
And I wish that she could see me.
I want to shatter her hypnosis and buy her a popsicle.

I see grass to my right.
A park I’ve never seen before?
As I get closer, I see the dome fenced in.
It might be a mosque in another country
But here it is . . . what? I never find out.
Maybe a reservoir. Maybe a power plant.
I know it is something municipal.
I want to find a place, a quieter place,
Somewhere I can go days from now.
There’s nowhere to sit in the sun in this city.
I want to find that place.

I take the next right.
A quieter, richer neighborhood.
The facades facing the street are new.
Construction trucks—
Little pick-ups with signs so they don’t get parking tickets—
Burden the streets a block away from their construction.

Here is the dream—
A swing hanging from a tree branch in the front yard,
A blue convertible BMW, top down,
A mission style, red-tiled roof with big windows.
Cliches of Americana.
I still feel the pull of wanting to buy the open house
But I know now that this is not what makes me happy.
They have the world’s biggest roses at this house.

I pass two cops on the road.
They’re on bicycles and wear yellow shirts.
(Will they think me a criminal?)
The one on the right looks at me once,
Twice,
Passes on me.
Would it be the same if I were
black? Brown?
A chandelier outside the gaudy house looks like it could
Swing into the expensive-looking window.
In my mind, I see it—
The gold and glass chandelier arching like a fragile
wrecking ball, shattering the glass of the window.
The broken sprinkler aims,
crippled, at the sidewalk and mists me gently as I aim to
walk through its spray.

Then the man—boy, really. He’s outside the pet store.
I notice his feet first—no shoes, socks only
(white where his soles don’t touch the ground,
brown where they do).
He doesn’t see me and walks ahead of me.
He walks towards the Land Rover
Then looks around—right, then left. He’s going to try the handle,
Attempt a theft.
He sees me watching him and stops, straightens up,
and changes course, looking casual where moments before
he looked desperate.
But I know now which is the boy and which the facade.

I hear a noise above me.
I look up to see a man—30s—with huge, hairy breasts.
He sees me looking up.
He says—an accent. Mexican? —
"Hey, man! How are you?"
He is holding a long black metal pole
which looks like the electric beater attachments
my mom used to mix cake batter with
(one for each son to lick off after the batter was in the oven)
and a cast iron cattle prod.
He is smiling sweetly and I still don’t know what that
thing he was holding was for.
"Good, Good!" I say back and I mean it.
We are both smiling now.
Stranger, smiling.
"Alright!" he says and he goes back to using his
cattle prod.
Strangers, smiling.

An old man carries a spectrum of flowers
away from a younger woman’s house.
The flowers are in a red terra cotta pot,
bowl-shaped like the Native American pottery
I saw last week at the natural history museum.
The man seems sad,
Burdened almost,
by the weight of these beautiful flowers.

Back now at the municipal building.
I can hear water now, flowing like a fountain
but still can’t see the water.
It is very green around the building—
grassy and succulent.
Everything now—the Red Chevy Ranchero from
my father’s time,
the port-a-potty and dead 7-11 coffee cups at the
construction site—makes me feel like an anthropologist.

I cross the street so I will be more in the sun.
I wonder now as I near home and pass the school again
if I will be a suspect on the evening news tonight for
Walking through the city.