Snow closed the city and left my officemate
stranded in the wasteland of the key card
five long icicle days in the breakroom.
As much of what made me leave Seattle
as made me find my way back in the dark
is his story, the coyote he watched dart
into the bulldozed field for holiday rabbits
between the Microsoft and the Nintendo,
what forms of survival, what warm sodas
and granola he scavenged from unlit drawers,
bowl of Caesar salad some project manager
ordered before the storm and he found wilted
in a conference room, fallen in like a grave.
Perhaps on your last day in Seattle
you will get to chase the cat, as I did,
along Northgate apartment shrubs
shared with a dentist’s office, and you too
will be the fool reclining patients watch
from blue chairs and from numb faces;
the cat wants to stay, a clawed want that hides
despite the frenzy of your hands, your mad
hollering silenced by inch-thick glass.
The Northgate Theater sign reads: Titanic.
Beyond: the patient lifeboats of Licton Springs.
Above: the gray pinstripe suite of the late sky.
I think the bookstores are emptier now
than when at 24 I rode the 242
across the floating bridge, dreaming of sturgeon
rounded from roaming the lake’s deep vowel,
a depth that unfolds like the road that brought me,
beneath light rain rhythmic on windshield.
And the cherry, apple, and plum in my yard
still ripen, do so on rough, hungover bark.
Above: a bat has spent all evening turning
over loops that trace their figures murky,
and although the home I left was always gone
and the one I will never catch I keep in mind,
the bat will go on however it wants to.