This poem has an epigraph from The Wizard of Oz.
When Dorothy says, "But it wasn't a dream.
It was a place.
And you, and you, and you, and you were there."
"The other side of the house."
"I walk out the kitchen door, trailing extension cords
into the open gaze of the Southwest.
The green surreptitious, dusty like a trench coat.
From the beautiful lawnmower float
curls of evaporated gasoline.
The hinged acts of the butterfly pauses.
Where am I in the stingy desert room,
where in the blank soul of the olive.
I hear the sand preparing to flee.
Many still moments aligned repair the thin split
of an afternoon.
Its orange fiction.
The dim aggression of my daughter on the terrace
drawing her idea of a home.
Somewhere I learned to walk out of a thought and not snap back,
the way railroad cars telescope into a train.
The sand flies so fast, it leaves no shadow."