Poem 2

I'm not sure when I wrote this one, but I think it is about coming back to Bellingham when I realized that it was my home town, and Spokane, the city in which I grew up, seemed unfamiliar.

Herds of cars tumble over the pass
as the snow builds on trees and rocks
and smoothes the change from
forest to grassland.
Tires fumble against cold road
and hum with a song
you whisper into the car under the stereo.
This drive evacuates Spokane again
with Christmas packed in the trunk,
and you flee back to candles:
light on a young woman’s shelf
that bounces off book spines,
and evenings smiling behind a mug
and loitering, a pile of heat,
in the bay’s wind.
Each street there, you could pry it up
and find names you almost know
and bars with cheap pool and cans of Rainier.
That cold there, after the river, the mountains,
the plateau.