Let’s go further into
this hard world
we’ve discovered.  Take a left
turn into the wind
so our faces become flushed with cold
and the fun of the gamble.
If we were explorers this would be
the plunge over the falls
into a valley full of
anachronisms.  We should
honor the stuck pig
on the stake up ahead,
a portent of what is to come,
our love a sacrifice to some god
known only to the desperate citizens
of this land.  I’ll make maps and
build fires of palm fronds and old
soda bottles, you can weave traps
and skin the rats we’ll be living on
for our whole time here.  Dirt poor and
stinking of fear and imagination,
we’ll establish a camp and fester
beyond the known ways,
and we’ll be legends elsewhere
for having gone somewhere unknown,
at least until the day we return.

No one will believe us then when we say
it was not horrible, not wonderful,
just another place like the one we came from,
full of people just like you except
we were the first to chart it and name it
and it was ours, all ours,
beloved homeland, found once and lost
and we do not speak of it often,
though the memory sustains us.