To Live Another Life

Live in a small apartment above a bakery and wake
to the buxom smell of yeasted dough, browned butter,

and sugar seeped from scones. Imagine the baker and barista
humming along to their opening shift playlist. Get that coffee

and scone, but not to go. When you go to work, go as a mailman.
Yes, a mailman, because you want to know how a man feels.

Make your deliveries on foot in an old neighborhood
with midcentury or craftsman architecture, doors painted

lilac or salmon, or with porch-style homes in an overlooked
neighborhood. It’s summer and in this life, children play

in the streets and the dogs wag because you carry meaty treats.
You walk and listen to the new music that kids listen to, slip bills

and flyers and maybe even a handwritten letter into a stranger’s life.
Maybe you know some secrets, who doesn’t buy from Amazon,

and who is a sucker for the World Wildlife Fund. You wave
to toddlers and cats through windows. Your stride will only get longer.

What a delicious, ordinary life. Maybe what you love will be easier.
To live another life isn’t a rescue, you know. Even if all that did happen

doesn’t happen, all those other details. Winter comes as it always does,
dark and descending, with its sweeping weather. Secrets weigh.

Things bite. No one writes by hand anymore. Eventually we are all swept.
You want to believe it could exist. But you wonder if, eventually,

we all end up knowing terrible things, and nothing for certain.
But isn’t that, you think, how you make a life,

with your own grit and grain? Isn’t that, you believe,
where the evidence of you is found?