SOME LOGISTICS FOR WALKING IN FLORIDA

You only need one word and a dog
To navigate the people on paths,
Dodge the sprinting lizards,
Step beneath the shedding palms,

For this is Florida, and you must
Walk before heat joins the moisture
Weighting the air, before afternoon rains
Steam from the pristine streets.

So, choose your word. Use with others
You meet. “Morning” is safe as tea.
“How-are-you” invites a response,
If you like, as does “Humid!”

If you’re the chatty type, then a phrase,
Like “Good day for it,” but let them
Decide what “it” might be,
If the day fits the duty.

They won’t tell you, that I promise.
Walkers seek human contact, only
That, runners a nod as they blow past,
And cars leaving condos, just a wave.

If you let them speak first,
They will compliment your little dog.
“Cutie,” she’ll say, and not to you,
While her husband stays silent.

But what is the word for
When a batch of flies launches
From the flat squirrel by the curb
Or (not wanting to enter

Her head-down solitude)
To the nurse walking from her car
To her shift with the ones
At the Memory Care Center?

She will narrate hours and gets sounds
In return, as tones, stories, years,
And selves evaporate around her,
Until she walks back to her car

At the end of the day. By then the rains
Are gone, the late sun flares, whitewashed
Egrets feed in the pond grass,
And the sky is empty of words.

Robert Bires studied with Charles Simic and McKeel McBride at the University of New Hampshire. He has published poems and stories in the Pennsylvania Review, ERA, and Chug: Unbound. He lives with his wife in Tennessee, where he plays in a rock band, The Introverts.