Tom Higgins

Tom Higgins is a poet living in New York. His work has appeared in the Minnesota Review, Gravitas, and What Rough Beast’s Coronavirus Edition.

Maps

We drove through rain all night,
crossing these borders no storm
ever stopped to admire.
As steady and unnoticed as a heart’s,
the wipers kept their rhythm
clearing our view of the dusk-eaten road
through the glimmering film of stars.
I could have closed my eyes
pretending I was anywhere
but here, even nowhere.
Drifting through time like this
the trick is not to hold the wheel
too tightly, to blink only once
in awhile, not to be lulled.
It took some time,
but we reached the storm’s limit,
leaving it somewhere between
here and nowhere, its rain
over unknown lives.
Nearing home at last,
we couldn’t see the city or its rivers,
not even the lights of the too-tall
buildings whose heights never rise
above water, sinking like us, like everything.
Home was as we left it,
but perhaps we never did,
dreaming in unison miles through rain
soaked maps, finding our way
through their fiction to morning again.
Mostly water, we swim our whole lives over land.