Difference
Talk to you tonight,
I wrote this morning, knowing
it would only be the afternoon
where you are, will be,
whole neighborhood still
wrapped in a tule fog
that won’t let up—so you reported
before supper
while I slept.
I almost wrote this afternoon
instead, taking your point
of view, dissolving into it—
but then imagined
you half-awake, and irked,
into my future/current noon
texting for clarification.
Copyright © 2015 by Nate Klug. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 3, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem was written as my partner and I were preparing to move, from the Central time zone to the Pacific. For a little while, she was out there before me. The displacement allowed for a kind of imaginative transference—to a point, at least.”
—Nate Klug
Nate Klug
Nate Klug is the author of Hosts and Guests (Princeton University Press, 2020) and Anyone (University of Chicago Press, 2015).