Money issues had got me down again, so I drove
to Dina’s office because she photographs well
nude in the desert. In spite of my scorn

for brokerages, I liked her building with its jungle
landscaping and Spanish colonial architecture,
and I was pleased as I walked through its dim,

cool corridors that this time I knew the way.
But her sign on the wall had been replaced,
and the entrance to her office remodeled.

Back in the parking lot I remembered, again,
she’d moved to a new location, but I’d lost
those directions, and she didn’t answer my calls.

There was a corporate shuttle on the blacktop,
so I boarded it, sat down across the aisle
from a corpulent manager thumbing through papers.

After a while, without agency, the van pulled onto the street,
and I finally spied the driver using passenger-side controls.
Up the main drag in Denver we lumbered, heading north,

twenty businessmen by then, and me. On my phone
I began again to read The Brothers Karamazov,
when it dawned on me that Dina didn’t work

for that company any more, and dawned on me again
we were no longer headed for the branch office,
but seemingly the airport, and then Toronto,

just over the border. Even if I had gotten off then,
I had no car to get me home, no passport,
lost and at the mercy of indifferent authorities.

Categories: The Grind
No Comments »