Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
When your phone dies, when the map’s legend goes missing,
peer into the gopher’s abandoned burrow. Or search for me
in margins between assigned reading and page edge, one
of many boundaries you cannot measure—that place
where the horizon expands and recedes. Search
again blank half pages at syllabus end, another
opening between arrival and beginning. I
will never deduct points or mark a firm-pressed stop
when you shift, lean into slivers of half-light somewhere
between class, practice, dinner—day’s smudged edge waiting
beyond the call and fetch of someone’s certain gaze, waiting for
what might be found where the directions arrive at you—
