These stanzas are drawn from a longer poem, titled “Park Slope Pastoral,” which is part of Lisa Smid’s forthcoming collection, “Twenty.”

If I can just get back to this field and the unhiding city
surrounding it, I can look for you in the air, I can find you in
the wind, I can feel you in the fluctuating heat.

I want not the guardian, the scribe, the recorder, the
preserver, the worker, the man of the city, the man of the
people, the hero. Not the officer and the gentleman, but the
kindred soul who walked the world with me, who smiled
without a face, who trekked the plains of his own living
dream song and kissed me at the right stop.