Walking through Ithaca

Night as cold as in a glass bottle

And the exhilirant unsteady sick revelry of breathing

In the thing that shouldn’t be cracking in the bonfire all the

fumes.

I smelled, briskly, an apple pie or cinnamon tendrils of a warm family antithesis when I was walking on the sidewalk, alone, past

I burn like a ball of lead through the leaf-crusted air thinking about you while I walk home, and nobody suspects a thing

Nobody except the people in my textbooks who are too good at deduction