Lost Person
(Later, Gathers Her Own Reward)

She is lost in her home town.
She lives there like a tourist.
Things she sees every day
still don’t look familiar.
Everyone there finds her odd
and she goes into their houses
as though they are foreign countries.

Some of us find the world
in the places where we were born.
Some of us can find no place there at all
except in retrospect.

We write books about these lost places
as though we knew what they were all about;
as though just by living there, we understood that place.
Actually, by writing about them we visit them again
and feel as much a stranger as we did before.
That is how we can stand to write about them.
They become the exotic other lands we’ve traveled to.
Misfortune becomes the best part of the story;
and we, at last, are grateful for it.