Snapshots from a Train (through New Jersey)

"Oh, to make the sky always bigger"


in the distance, two male figures in shadow, crouched toy soldiers at the edge of the water


a whole neighborhood with that wooden fence we used to have, the wood dark and rotting, just so, soft as grass---a gentle fence, with a gap the stray cats could fit through


old cathedral warehouses, factories, windowpanes yellowed and fragile like paper lanterns, like a series of hungry mouths glinting in the sun, cracked and missing teeth

Float

Ears submerged in the water, seashell-quiet, belly-up.  On the other side of the world, the sky is different, somehow, full of faint constellations you've never seen, may not see, ever again. Think of it: the evening is warm, the sky stars and trees are the silent arc just outside your eyes, the water gently bobbing at the sides of your face, nearing the edges of your eyes. Float, like you have no body. Like a child might, before the body's in stasis, before we grow used to it. We grow used to our bodies, like the creaks in the stairs of your house, the soft pattern of noise they'd make every morning. The groan of certain steps in the winter time.

Float like this, not feeling your body, because you won't have to recall anything, if you forget this body now.  Float like the sky and the water and children do, free as wild storms, things without eyes.

We grow older, and want to be touched, falling back into our bodies, anchors in the silt.

The Last Day of Summer

She saw the kittens two weeks ago, suddenly 
three of them, still wobbly, unseeing, now sleeping 
on their mother, somewhere in the backyard, 
milk-drunk, like their new eyes. 
The trees are nodding softly as the day cools, 
the hidden sun now sinking.  "I saw them digging 
in the dirt," she tells me. "They look strong---
I think they're going to be strong."

The Falling Man

A split-second
of the ten whole seconds
that you fell
you were not a tumbling body
but a fluttering arrow--
black and white, against metal
a ruffled and broken wing
still beating, getting in
some good, clean, air

selfish

to kiss your babies
on the forehead
because i loved you,
once.