Nightrunning

After you run, you drive home through the dark,
past houses lit from within like pumpkins,
TV screens large as gardens, photos lined up
along sand walls, or is it taupe? Suddenly

it matters, you want to jump from the car,
pound on a door, demand "Which is it? Which?"
But before the drive home, before the
pumpkin houses, you run. Later each time

until the time it's too late, when you start
out at dusk and run headlong into night.
Treeshadows looming, distance closing,
deer unseen until they move at the last like

stalkers, and now you're a moth following
streetlights around a bend. But before the
mothwoman, before the last streetlight,
there was this: will you ever stop pretending?

that the houses don't make you weep,
the photographs, the windowlight spilling
onto lawns? Someone you could never see,
then meet yourself, by chance, on a nightrun.