December 2006

And so among the starry refineries
and cattail ditches of New Jersey
his bus dips from egg-white sky into shadow.
When he next looks up from Kafka a blur
of green sanatorium tile flows by
then presto, Port Authority, full daylight.
He has been cheated of...

Sometimes the season changed in the telling,
sometimes the state, but it was always during

the Depression, and he was alone in the boxcar,
the train stalled beneath a sky wider

than any he'd seen so far, the fields of grass
wider than the sky....

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Somewhere they are weeds beside the long road,
lord of mishandling, lord unbefitting.

They are red ruined by rainwater or
the rust of a rebar tossed in disuse.

Nightingales name them, across the chasm.
But not this one who crooks a swollen finger...