Peripheral Vision

The officer has a clean notebook

and a pen that clicks like a cicada.

He asks me the color of the shutters

across the street, and I look at the sky.

I’ve lived here six years,

drank a thousand mornings on this porch,

and I couldn't tell him if that house

is slate gray or a tired, sun-bleached blue.

I see a chipped flowerpot on their sill,

terracotta flaking like a dry scab.

It must have been there all winter.

I stare at it now, a stranger

in my own front yard.