New Dark Ages

The Northeast Corridor

The Northeast Corridor The bar in the commuter station steams like a ruin, its fourth wall open to the crowd and the fluttering timetables. In the farthest corner, the television crackles a torch song and a beaded gown. She is my favorite singer, dead when I was born. And I have been waiting for hours for a train, exhausted between connections to small cities, awake only in my eyes finding shelter in the fluttering ribbon of shadow around the dead woman singing on the screen. Exhaustion is a last line of defense where time either stops dead or kills you. It teaches you to see what your eyes see •without questions, without the politics of living in one city, dying in another. How badly I would like to sleep now in the shadows beside real things or beside things that were real once, like the beaded gown on the television, like the debut of a song in New York in black and white when my parents were there. I feel sometimes my life was used up before I was born. My eyes sear backwards into my head to the makeshift of what I have already seen or heard described or dreamed about, too weary not to envy the world its useless outlines. Books of photographs of New York in the forties. The dark rhombus of a window of a train rushing past my train. The dark halo around the body of a woman I love from something much farther than a distance. 12 The world is insatiable. It takes your legs off, it takes your arms and parades in front of you such wonderful things, such pictures of warm houses trellised along the sides with green so deep it is like black air, only transparent, of women singing, of trains of lithium on the awakening body of a landscape or across the backdrop of an old city steaming and high-shouldered as the nmeteen-forties. The world exhausts everything except my eyes because it is a long walk to the world begun before I was born. In the far corner the dead woman bows off stage. The television crumples into a white dot as the last train of the evening, my train, is announced. I lived in one place. I want to die in another. 13 ...