Maybe the street is tired of being a street.
They tell how it used to be called Bois d’Arc,
now called Main, how boys in short pants
caught crawdads for supper at a stone acequia
now covered over.
Sometimes the street sweeper stops his machine
and covers his eyes.

Think of the jobs people have.
The girl weighing citron in the basement
of H.L. Green’s, for a man who says
he can’t wait to make fruitcake
and she says, What is this stuff anyway
before it looks like this? and he leaves
on his cane, slowly, clutching the bag.
Then she weights garlics for a trucker.

Think of the streams of headlights
on the Houston freeway all headed somewhere
and where they will be headed after that.
After so long, even jets might be tired of acceleration,
slow-down, touching-ground-again,
as a child is so tired of his notebook
he pastes dinosaurs on it to render it extinct.
Or the teacher, tired of questions,
hearing the anthem How long does it have to be?
play itself over and over in her sleep
and she doesn’t know. As long as you want it.

What was this world? Where things you never did
felt more real than what happened.
Your friend’s dishtowel strung over her faucet,
was a sentence which could be diagrammed
while your tumble life, that basket of phrases,
had too many ways it might fit together.
Where a street might just as easily have been
a hair ribbon in a girl’s ponytail
her first day of dance class, teacher in mauve leotard
rising to say, We have much ahead of us,
and the little girls following, kick, kick, kick,
thinking what a proud sleek person she was,
how they wanted to be like her someday,
while she stared outside the window at the high wires
strung with ice, the voices inside them opening out
to every future which was not hers.