untitled
she sets out
alone.
it’s one of those barren january mornings
that seeps into your bones, numbs
you from gut to skin.
the engine stutters, coughs, cuts.
she curses, turns the key
again. reluctantly life grumbles,
holds. it’s still early, only other
traffic the insomniac and the
overzealous. too
early still for the world
to know. she’s mapped out
the route in her head a
hundred times now, in
secret; she
had told him, told him
and told him and told
him: we have to be
more careful. this could
ruin
everything.
she never
felt so
small. and yet,
and yet and yet
her face set now against
the cold and the consequence,
she spares no thought
for him, for the whatifs
& the ifonlys, shoulders
this moment like a
good girl her school-
books, looks only
ahead, prays
the engine won’t drop
before she reaches
the clinic.
July landscape, mid-Virginia
train whistles its late-afternoon
warning over the banks, shooing
herons from their nests, dockworkers
from their reveries; downstream
an earthbound descendant of
graffitied cement and rusty idealism
derives the ebb of the river’s summered
bottom with circles formulated
around the circumference
of heaven and lines drawn
up by hell’s indifference:
equations like battlescars written
not in flesh and blood but in
currents and railroad tracks and cut
deep in post-modern
denial.
Hollywood
We hike through a gray Indian
January scratched by skeleton
branches looking down
over the rocks where
a train tangles its way
between the river and the
dead.
