Jesse Wolfe is an English Professor at CSU Stanislaus. His book Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy is a scholarly work about love and avant-garde writing in the early twentieth century.

Homework
By Jesse Wolfe

The flag in the parking lot hung
At half-mast.

I was at the same McDonalds window-table
Across the street from the theater,
Pushing through another Saturday’s work
While the kids scurried through the knots of slides.

I always love the ride home:
First, untangling the plot
(Why did the hero wash up on the island,
What did he need first?);

Then, if lucky, we smooth out the themes:
Was the movie about home?
The line between a true and false friend?
We might touch (lightly,
Like molecules of rain on the windshield)
Terrain we’ve crossed, relocating:
Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada.

They rose, from inarticulate months of grief,
Sudden events in the evening sky.

My temptation: to seek codes
In their silences, or to think:
Certain phrases stand, not for places,
But for how we believe we felt
When we lived there.

The grounds of that McDonalds were lovely:
Palms rose over the rooftop,
The lawns sparkled.
There is work I can only do
By letting go: my hands off the wheel,
The car will find its own way
Down the long freeway,
Past motels, 24-hour gas stations,
Toward whatever they—inarticulate—need.