Old Haunt Bottles and butts in the strip mall lot Where beneath the prairie moon Kids in clusters eyed one another While truck-cab doors blew tunes In the dark, each denim jacket And gleam of light-brown hair Like the shock of headlights in your lane To think that she might be there At the checkout line, in the time it takes To ring up a case of beer You've learned the cashier's mom and your uncle Went out their junior year Through the plate glass of the booth By the home improvement aisle The guy who used to steal your floppy disks Gives a sheepish smile And above the flat and scrubby plain The pale horizon seems to reach To the edges of the earth: Manhattan or Manhattan Beach You sleep in your backseat And for a weekend's pay You could get to the coast in three days A bird's been stuffed, a pumpkin gutted And a quart of whisky drunk When you join the boys for the yearly ritual Of watching Tech get skunked As you stare out at your dad's Homemade garden-hose reel Your cousin says, "I saw you on TV For that genome deal" At 2:00 a.m. when you can't sleep You slip out the mudroom door And drive toward the car lots But turn south just past Route 4 You find you're stopping where you parked When you cut Aunt Ida's grass And watching that same door you'd hope Would open at every pass And above the scrubby plain The night has cracked apart the shell of day The stars askew as though if you stepped out The earth would fall away You'd drift into the silence and the cold of space Where there's nothing to recall you to this place...