The Road That Is Still Deciding

Every road I have walked is still walking somewhere
without me, the way a river keeps its shape
long after the water that shaped it has gone downstream
to be some other river, some other year.

I left my footprints in so many countries
that the ground has started stitching them together
at night, when no one's looking,
a long gray thread pulled taut between
the girl I was and this stranger
wearing her face like a borrowed coat.

The years don't pass so much as they fold,
each one a smaller room inside the last,
until I am standing in a house made entirely of doors
and every door is a year
and every year is slightly ajar,
letting in a draft that smells like someone else's kitchen, someone else's rain.

Somewhere behind me, a road is still deciding whether it was mine,
it curls like smoke, uncertain of its own direction,
touches a town I lived in once
the way a tongue touches a tooth that's no longer aching just to be sure.

And somewhere ahead, the road I haven't walked is already remembering me,
already keeping a light on
in a window I won't reach for another decade,
patient, the way only distance is patient, the way only time
can afford to wait for a woman
who is still, impossibly, arriving
at every place she has already left.