Poetry from The Literary Review



The Afternoon Walk

MATTHEW LIPPMAN


I walked three thousand miles with my boots on.
Then I took them off.
I saw lizards in Utah and put my face in the Hudson.
I fell off the back of a truck in West Virginia
and picked my nose in Kalamazoo.
There was a woman in Houston and an elephant in St. Louis.
After Kentucky I called my mother to tell her the wind was a mule
and licking stamps was the only way to go.
She said nothing
and the hiss of our connection made me turn around.
When I got to Spokane my best friend had walked his dog four hundred times
and rested his head watching butterflies.
Everything about his life appealed to me because it was his life.
That's why Cairo, Missouri means nothing in the rain.
When I got there I put my feet in the Mississippi with these boots on.
I knew it was dangerous
but I was a dangerous man then
and carried a box of toothpicks and a box of matches.
I became soft in the Badlands and drank beer from a cup.
The birds were swallows and the flowers were hydrangeas.
That was in the Badlands. In Wyoming
everything looked like Mars
and the Wind Rivers took up half the world.
I tried to think of something political, like the Department of Forestry,
but none of it worked.
So I left, headed south and east toward Nebraska
but found my feet in Iowa
and my soul in Davenport.
That's when the hills were the cows and the cows were the fields
and sitting down was a miracle.
That's when I took my boots off.
That's when everything stopped moving.