For how many years have I kept up the lie, the story
of the middle-aged man in the cap and the gray
or possibly bluish sweatshirt
gaining on me in the night, wrenching
me off the street by my neck, and tossing me
into a ditch, where he had me pinned? I have
paced, I have reflected, I have purposelessly
driven a car to the Unglaciated Appalachian Plateau
at the state’s south margin, then circled back
to the central till plain, and it has come to me I must
come clean. It wasn’t
                                                a ditch. It was flat.
My regrets at having repeatedly dismissed the land’s