A Paraklausithyron

is an old kind of poemaddressed to the doorof a house you want to get into,where someone you are intolives. Evening sees you return

to that door that stays shut,and if it would only open wide enoughyour song could change from lamentto love. Our campaign was longthe season I canvassed a city

and its hinterlands, ostensiblyfor John Kerry. At the time it felt dire,that nothing could be moreimportant, and I knocked on doorsfrom hefty moneyed houses

that gave me lemonade in clean tall glassesto the most falling downplaces. And by no means,we were told, could we ever enter,anywhere. About to ring

a bell on a dead-end street, I sawthrough a picture window a naked manasleep on his couch, and on top of hima crested iguana the length of a golf club,also sleeping. Sitting together

on the cool concrete of her front steps,I wept with an old womanwho had just buried her sonand finished her story, but yes but yesI'm voting for Kerry.

In a Mill Creek Valley housing projectI can't find now on a map,no one on my Palm Pilot's listof registered namescame to the door; everyone said

of everyone, they don't live hereanymore. Laundry hung from windowsto dry in the air that smelledlike a leak of somethingnobody should breathe.

Standing in the dirt courtyard,I looked up and could see, highon the highest hill, my university,where I'd taken in so many timesthe almost panoramic view,

and I never knew.Once a man who lived on a State Streettried to get me inside,behind his door with him.But that's not how the poem goes.

Predicated on separation,stubbornness and never-having,the paraklausithyron,and always ending with another plea.I walked through an America about to vote

and it made me dizzy sometimes,how I could smell some intricate historyat each threshold—bread baked,a pet gerbil, a toxic cleaner or clingy cologne,the rubber of a tricycle's handlebars

and the plastic of its streamers,an ashtray between two tumblersleft behind the night before.I was often sure someone was homeand would not come to me for anything.