You could tell it was him by the clothes he lived in
the T-shirt that was supposed to be white,
now the color of bushes on the side of the bike trail
jeans slack from walking and sleeping,
hard-pressed to use the bathroom, brush his teeth
let alone wash socks (if he has any),
air around him fermenting fruit
But then again, our neighborhood smells like that
when steam puffs out of smokestacks from the winery on Clovis Avenue
Everyone knows about it,
and the meth house on the corner of the street,
the squad cars, the helicopters, the megaphones,
the woman in the white van calling out to anyone who will listen,
“Tamales, tamales!”
But we don’t know him,
even though we’ve seen him a hundred times.
He’s just the guy who walks up and down Clovis Avenue,
where the old railroad used to run.
Back in the 1930s, my family says,
Grandpa was a bum
hopping trains across the country.
I wonder how his chin looked in the summer
Did he shave
or let it grow like the old weedy beard on this guy
walking underneath canopies of ash trees
where even birds have the right to build nests?
Did he whistle, the skin across his cheeks stretching
like metal on the bed of a high-brow truck
or apologize for climbing over the invisible barbed-wire fence
planted around homeowners’ associations?
Did he ever get so tired of being nameless
that he walked up to someone, anyone
a mother, a father, a shop owner
stick out his hand and say,
“Hello. My name is Douglass.”
Did they take the tweed of his palm,
look into his eyes,
talk about the weather
or hide behind the twigs around their eyes
until he hid, too,
behind the brush on the side of the road,
hugging the home within his ribcage?
I hope to God that didn’t happen.
I hope he tipped his hat,
slicked sweat-darkened feathers out of his face
chuckled like a mockingbird,
jutted out his chin,
grinned so big they could see each pearl-handled tooth
nodded to say,
“Nobody owns the sky.”