My married friends have houses and backyards.
I envy their space, their gardened privacy,
but not their mortgage. I’m in an apartment
at this confusing complex where each building
resembles all the others, except for its letter.
Mine’s M, the middle of the alphabet,
yet all the way to the end of this maze of narrow,
speed-humped lanes, which makes no sense to me.
I suppose that life often means being lost
in someone else’s notion of good order.
This side of town is strip malls and cheap rentals.
Barely a square of sidewalk anywhere.
So, when I walk my dog—I mean the longer
evening stroll, not that hurried morning plea
on the trampled lawn connecting N and O—
first we must drive two miles to the reservoir
where there’s an entrance to the local greenway.
The greenway’s a place that makes some sense to me.
Its well-maintained and clearly labeled trails,
one of which runs along the river flowing
from the dam, always bring me calm.
After work when I go there with Ernie
(that’s my dog’s name; alas, there is no Bert),
we take this river trail that also loops
through a grove of sycamore and beech to the crest
of a meadowed hill. In October, you can view
the fall colors there, and in winter glimpse
the sign for Target a half-mile away.
Occasionally, I’ll see a jogger clutching
one of their distinctive bags, combining
exercise and errands to save time—
more needless complication than convenience.
Walking, I hold the leash but Ernie leads,
always wanting to be out in front,
though pausing often for a lengthy sniff
of the grass and underbrush that thrive nearby.
While the pavement has decided where we step,
Ernie travels this other path, from scent
to scent; it’s one encompassed by our circuit
yet out of reach to me, and ever-changing
in a way that must feel both exhilarating
and secure, like a roller coaster’s engineered
chaos or a set of raucous variations
constrained by a single musical key. I stride
my own invisible path as well, though it
seems static as this asphalt: a litany
of indiscretions—some hours, some decades old—
slight, for the most part, of small consequence
to anyone but me, for whom it keeps
a perpetual, recriminating edge.
I might think of that five once swiped from the pocket
of a passed-out friend…my snide remark to the flustered
clerk who dropped my eggs…or how I quit
the swim team senior year for a part-time job….
It’s a list that goes on and on and on and on.
Eventually our shared, divergent route
returns us once more to the parking lot,
the origin and end of every walk.
After I’ve frisked Ernie for ticks—legs, belly,
flanks, floppy ears—after he’s lapped his fill
of spigot-water from a plastic bowl,
we climb into the car and sit, reluctant
to return to the apartment, to our life.
If we left now, we might arrive to the racket
of our upstairs neighbors’ supper argument
(their muffled accusations wafting down
with the reek of over-boiled vegetables
and meat scorched hard as the consonants they hurl
at one another across the kitchen table),
receiving the discomforts of living close
to people, minus the pleasure of eavesdropping.
And so we linger here a little longer.
Others sit too, displayed in the slanted glass
of their cars: alone or in pairs, but never more
than that; the greenway’s not a place for groups.
Collective in our separate hesitations,
we achieve a kind of public privacy,
sometimes subject to each other’s glances
and, once in a while, a covert stare or two.
Like last week, how, in a gray sedan across
from us, there was this red-faced couple slouching
silently in opposite directions.
The man had a certain odd tilt to his head.
Then, without word or other outward warning,
never looking back at him or the car,
the woman left and entered a blue hatchback
she had unlocked with a double chirp from her fob
(a zombie chickadee’s empty two-note call).
She drove off, and he seemed to follow, but
only as far as the road before their routes
divided. Or, like yesterday: a man
in the Honda next to ours, his seat reclined,
was napping, tie and collar loose, a jacket
draped over the empty passenger seat to his right—
as if it too required some brief shut-eye.
Beside himself was what I thought, a pun
in place of the truth. (Who knew if his fatigue
was physical or because he felt distraught?)
When Ernie began to whine, I started the car,
hoping the turning over of my engine—
then the clatter of gravel as I pulled away—
hadn’t interrupted that man’s sleep.
I didn’t turn my head to see for sure.
Perhaps he dozed there till the evening light
(worn, but ordered) roused him with its warmth.
Peter Vertacnik is the author of The Nature of Things Fragile (Criterion) and winner of the 2023 New Criterion Poetry Prize. He lives and works in Jacksonville, Florida.
Image: Annie Spratt for Unsplash+
