THE WANDERER
If it’s the sort of house
makes you wonder who lives there,
and you stop as if it might be you,
are you that poet passing by
who dreams he’s lived there,
forever fixed in one afternoon’s light?
And if there’s a wife at a window,
her mind her own but her mother’s too,
always aware of any children at play
behind the fig tree, do you wonder
if in her empty street she even sees you,
you who try to see and say all,
to frame it all in: birds mid-
air and a garden leafing out of time
and deepest starry space?
Author’s Bio
Don Russ is the author of Dream Driving (Kennesaw State University Press) and the chapbooks Adam’s Nap (Billy Goat Press) and World’s One Heart (The Next Review). His poem, “Girl with Gerbil,” was chosen for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2012 after it appeared in The Cincinnati Review.