67: Out of Some Other Paradise
67: Out of Some Other Paradise
Out of Some Other Paradise
by Alex Dimitrov
And people walked out of churches and bars,
cafés and apartments, cities, towns, photographs,
someone’s Friday night party,
someone they once knew or slept with.
They walked out of meetings and dinners,
out of lives, on each other, on love
and rarely on time.
Some walked out of dark places,
slow places, strange places, places
they wouldn’t go back to, places they never did find.
Then did. And walked out again
for the third, fourth, fifth time perhaps.
People walked out through doors
and through letters, through looks across rooms,
gifts that gave nothing of what they withheld,
what they couldn’t give back. Then others
just walked out on everything. That was that.
What can be said about what we do to each other.
What street, I don’t remember,
on the way to someone’s going-away,
I saw you, as if in the middle of a sentence,
snow: your new evening clothes.
"Out of Some Other Paradise," from TOGETHER AND BY OURSELVES by Alex Dimitrov. Copyright © 2017 by Alex Dimitrov. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press.
