The number I have dialed is not in service.
That means you made it: the wife, the kid, the dog,
the full-packed Westphalia and you, past fifty, now,
in years and miles per hour, have gone away,
to some other elsewhere.

We have by heart the numbers we need.
The others are all speed-dial detritus.
I have had by heart 668-7502—
which is not in service, now—
for 17 years: a significant number
I will forget.

They have prettified the Shipyards slum for the tourists.
I walk here, thinking how history
is about how we re-imagine what we forget.
One day, in a faux-pearl elsewhere,
I will re-imagine
all my forgotten numbers.

It is not in service,
of anything, or anyone, now, that you, past fifty,
in age and speed, with a wife and a kid and a dog,
defy in a full-packed Westphalia the numberless stars;
and I, now, abandoned in a theme park, elsewhere,

study the art,
so difficult, of forgetting.