| Now, moving in, cartons on the floor
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| The radio playing to bare walls
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| Picture hooks left stranded
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| In the unsoiled squares where paintings were
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| And something reminding us
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| This is like all other moving days;
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| Finding the dirty ends of someone else’s life
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| Hair fallen in the sink, a peach pit
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| And burned-out matches in the corner;
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| Things not preserved, yet never swept away
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| Like fragments of disturbing dreams
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| We stumble on all day.
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| In ordering our lives, we will discard them
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| Scrub clean the floorboards of this our home
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| Lest refuse from the lives we did not lead
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| Become, in some strange, frightening way, our own
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| And we have plans that will not tolerate
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| Our fears-- a year laid out like rooms
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| In a new house--the dusty wine glasses
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| Rinsed off, the vases filled, and bookshelves
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| Sagging with heavy winter books
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| Seeing the room always as it will be
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| We are content to dust and wait
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| We will return here from the dark and silent
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| Streets, arms full of books and food
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| Anxious as we always are in winter
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| And looking for the Good Life we have made
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| I see myself then: tense, solemn
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| In high-heeled shoes that pinch
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| Not basking in the light of goals fulfilled
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| But looking back to now and seeing
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| A lazy, sunburned, sandaled girl
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| In a bare room, full of promise
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| And feeling envious
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| Now we plan, postponing, pushing our lives forward
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| Into the future--as if, when the room
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| Contains us and all our treasured junk
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| We will have filled whatever gap it is
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| That makes us wander, discontented
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| From ourselves
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| The room will not change:
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| A rug, or armchair, or new coat of paint
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| Won’t make much difference;
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| Our eyes are fickle
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| But we remain the same beneath our suntans
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| Pale, frightened
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| Dreaming ourselves backward and forward in time
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| Dreaming our dreaming selves
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| I look forward and see myself looking back |