are all lies. I left my love
in the ER and slid
into predawn dark, faintly aware

that I passed through the afterlife
of a Pottawattami village noted
on the Treaty of Detroit. Evergreen

climbs from the Rouge through the city
until it grays in a welter of interstates
and stripmalls. But it begins where

an old road once stretched toward
its eponymous end in Chicago. I stopped
at that wide intersection and glimpsed

deer browsing the verdant brush.
They seemed unsurprised by their hungers.
Lacking their circumspection, their

willingness to vanish at dawn,
I drove off, drifting across lanes
and plummeting through time.