I have gotten good at leaving.
you learn the muscle of it।

the bag that knows its own weight,
the way a room forgets you
before you've reached the stairs.

it's the arriving I can't do anymore.

somewhere there is a house
that still answers to my name,
or did. 
my mother writes that the lane is paved now.
the mango tree came down in a storm.
the boy next door has a daughter.

I read this the way you read about a country
you once believed you lived in.

I could go. 
the road is right there,
patient as a dog.
but a house 
keeps living while you're gone-
it repaints, it forgets your height on the doorframe,
it lets someone else learn where the light switch hides.

what if I knock and the door is kind
and does not know me?

so, I stay one more city out.
from here the kitchen is always warm.
from here the lamp is always lit
in the window I am always almost reaching.

distance is a mercy. 
it keeps the place
exactly as I left it-
which is to say, gone,
which is to say, mine.

some nights I almost go
I get as far as the station.
the ticket sweats in my hand.
the name of the town 
sits in my mouth like a stone.

I think of the gate.
someone has oiled it by now.
it opens without a word-
the one sound I still live inside,
gone quiet to be kind.

I do not buy the ticket.
I keep the boy a boy, I keep the tree, and the
light switch exactly where my hand remembers.
I keep a house where the hinge still complains.
I keep a lane the rain has not yet hardened.
I keep my mother's voice in the next room,
counting something, never finished counting.

I sleep and leave before the morning can argue —
that the city got on without me.
that it was always going to.
that home was never the place.
it was the version of me that still believed in it.
let me be the one who remembers it wrong,
if remembering it right means letting it change.

a man I have never met
wakes in a room I have not seen.
he boils water. 
he opens a window
I have spent years learning to picture closed.

In the morning he hangs his washing
on a line strung across my childhood.
he is patient. he has all day.
the shirts fill with wind and point the other way.

the gate does not complain.
the water comes to a boil.
somewhere a tree I keep alive
has been firewood for years.

jamaica, New York.