Here is a house in South Dakota.
It is not where I was born, nor would I say it is where I am from,
But it is where things are simple and childhood is sweet,
And my best friend lives next-door to me,
And she still has two brothers and I all three cats,
And we watch cartoons and eat chicken pot pies,
And waddle through three-foot-tall snow drifts in the winter,
Bundled in overalls and heavy coats like marshmallows
Waving at the snow plows as they scrape by.
Here is the Pebble Creek apartment complex,
Where I resign myself to a life of listening
To the soft, unimposing drone of people going about their lives,
Blissfully without consideration of me.
It is here that I stuff myself into a dryer
To hide from a tornado whose roar I cannot hear.
It is here that I attend a Halloween party as a ladybug
And stay out past curfew to ride my first skateboard,
And where the coolest place for kids to hang out
Is the brown gazebo in the park.
Here is the house on Miramont Street,
Where nothing exceptionally dramatic has happened,
Except for this time when the neighbor’s German shepherd
Climbs onto the roof through a second-story window,
And someone calls animal control because the owner
Won’t answer the door when we knock,
And a few days later the cops come to find him
Dead on the bedroom floor due to suicide.
The neighborhood never makes a sound.
Here is the house on Hawthorne Avenue,
Which belongs to a suburb in the middle of the desert,
Next to an Indian reservation
And a casino.
I ride my bike for miles into the dust, never meeting anyone but the southwest wind,
And the only person who speaks to my family
Is an elderly widow who crochets fingerless gloves, grows cherries,
And waits for the rain to come.
Here is 108 Deer Path, in Manitou,
Which was built in 1864 and lacks air conditioning because
The mountains are just quiet enough for you to realize how hot it is,
But the alpine breeze makes you forget.
Tourists who wander into the town are rushed by the odor of marijuana and
The sour stench of hippies and incense,
And when they shuffle past the street kids playing banjo on the sidewalk,
The vagrants just smile, sleepless but kind,
Because they are attached to nothing, nowhere, nobody.
Now here is a little brick dorm room with thin walls,
In a city with which I am not quite familiar,
Where conversation crackles in the air like electricity and
I cannot keep my window open at night like I used to because
Inevitably a car horn or a drunk frat boy will sound and wake me
From a dream in which I am longing for all the places I have been—
In which I am yearning for the serendipity of silence and simplicity,
When things were young again and I could not possibly comprehend
The enormous noise of this world, this life.