Poem Toward People

I’ve always been obsessed with people—

whether or not I know them. Obsessed

by our knowledge of each other, the quality

of connection, our friendship or non-friendship,

its relation to other connections. Obsessed

by the way a new connection can change pre-existing

ones, reorder them, renew them, fine-tune

or disappear them. By the light pressure

of an other’s existence, which in turn grows

me. Obsessed by memory and lack of memory

for the way things were—I don’t think I’d recognize

you if I saw you on the street, though in the past

so obsessed I thought almost everyone

was you. Obsessed with leaving people

so I can obsess about them again.

By thinking with and through people, dead

and alive, without whom I’d be a different person,

think different thoughts. Even obsessed

with the version of me I don’t know, walking around

having met different people, thinking different

thoughts, moving in a different direction, away

from people and toward the self,

or the desert, or the sea, or the god, or the page, or the mountain,

or the canyon, or the forest, or the dark.