New York >> Boston (by train)
Looking out the window, hard at work
on some personal containment principle
The two times I've caught myself reflected
I start and think, who the fuck?
So I'm looking through me
I'm picking words out of a magician’s hat:
placid
dead
tawny
rust
But it’s true—the light was rusty, and
it was a little bit broken
A variable light,
two moments ago it was golden to me
I’m not talking about egalitarian beauty
This is the best lake I have ever seen
Rolling nothing,
expanding but not infinitely
I am rowing out to the center
in a blue bottomed boat I stole from the shore
I am not scared of sinking
Plant my tennis shoe on what might be
the start of a hole in the hull of the boat
Does aluminum rust?
No, but it does corrode, giving way to
the soft, quiet pink of oxidation
Three ducks do a slow unison dodge
It's a small group number,
our four bodies weaving into the negative space between
sheets of ice that are just floating around
Things feel easy here,
and I’m fullI, I mean,
I know I’m lonely now, back on the train
with the dotted outline of a head on my shoulder
missing a companion traveler,
But, I’ve been more lonely before
This stop is Providence
I wouldn’t know, conductor, you with the hat, if you hadn’t told me
Hot brick boxes, cool grey sky
Familiar feeling like I've been here before
Watching you, baby, kiss your ex-girlfriend out the window,
small ouch but
the sound is off and
there are no consequences here, not really
Red reiterates in my eye, streaks of it,
light slashing horizontal the trunks of dead trees
(maybe just asleep) with skinny arms and white gloves
Beauty everywhere now, and
everything assigned a color
Thigh vibrates, a cellular nudge
from a girl whose ass I once admired, and
not in an offhand way
Her tawny body, lithe and sinewy, what I had wanted
was for her to want mine for awhile
Stomach kicks a little at the memory of that
magnificent humiliation, and when later on
I went happily to the train station,
pretending that my few minor failures don’t make me one.
Boston >> New York (by train)
Out of the pitch, a porch light stirs
little glow, near religion,
/ small beacon, north-ish star
painfully slow train
knowing that two stops away
there is a body
who can be mine