If the Weather Holds

Maybe one day I will get back to this house. I will glide up this street in a car with someone whose face is knit in a certain pattern of familiar. But compared to the gauges on the dashboard, the marked book tossed on the back seat, a stray ticket-stub, a receipt, some future date smudged on its thin yellow paper— next to these shavings of a world, shoved so close I won't see it, but will see everything through its sheer weather— this house will become: brick, two-storied, with a porch and a walk leading up to it. I will suddenly see it—as a postman must see, delivering to doorsteps small parcels of other worlds, flung threads streaming from distant entanglements. The house will stand here, a square measured version of itself. Like you when I came to the airport—strangers streaming from the tunnel, zipped bags slung over their shoulders, and you among them: a photograph, a sum of known features that would only add up to itself. For the whole ride home you were: a person in a car, loved by someone. My month alone pooled at your shoes, the air shimmering and certain.