Flickering Stations

The Quiet Car

A new decree announced on Monday’s train:“The final car is now the quiet car.”Already strangers barely speak aboveThe music wedged inside their ears.The others stare or sleep as if alone.In her deathbed my mother’s talk has ceased.I’ll cross the bridge to visit her againWhen the workday’s done. She’s still. So silent nowThat the nods and blinks of need have stopped.Her eyes have closed to us. She’s in between.Her safety rails are lowered now like oarsFor a boatman who hushes everyoneWhen we, like mute commuters, travel downPast flickering stations into a tunneled world.“The final car is now the quiet car.”

Free Dirt

I see the signs on the main road.This former city kid takes note.I’ve asked around enough to knowthe things that local farmers knowabout those man-made hills for sale.Some men have craters in their yardsfrom an old stone foundation, somea stream that’s dried-up over timeand lies there as a ditch betweentwo fields. They might need yards of itor just a small amount to keeparound and tamp into ravines or fill a divot by the gateor slope a road for better drainage.They say you better ask the sellerquestions when bartering. What kindis it? Clean fill without the harshcontaminants? Or is it screened—no rubble, sand, and gravel? Oris it top soil? That dirt is dear,but it makes Jersey produce thrivefrom the brown mounds you see lined up.We’re born to use free dirt—to fillthe holes that twist us up, to eatwhat stems from buried roots, and mixloam for our brick and plaster walls.When dead we take on all the earthone shovelful at a time until,no longer clean or screened or free,it’s layered on like comfortersagainst the coldest void we know.

Cadences of Light

I left behind the shimmering broken glasson childhood streets in Philadelphiaand witnessed matchless light in other places,the clarity in southern France, what paintershad felt when hands and palettes trembled, watchedthe filtered light of Canterbury beamthrough the stained glass, the cobalt blues and purpleson a tiled floor that would have made Vermeerextend his stay and prop an easel there.While the Red Screes near Ambleside were luminousand cast in bronze, a honeyed tincture fusedon a mare’s tail Romantics must have knowntrekking with branches as their walking sticks.But sunlit marvels dazzling memoryon inner eyelids fail to stir me half as much as when I think of you immersedin morning light through wavy handblown panesin an eighteenth-century room we called our ownfor the weekend. October had its wayfrom misty peaks down Chester County hills.The bedposts gleamed. The Windsor chair legs splayedacross the lucent planks. The crockeryand hearthstone shone their lacquered sheens. I followedas shafts sank far beneath your floral dress,your bosom’s groove, perhaps beneath your skinitself, a golden element that frozethe two of us and hushed all but our hearts.