This is what it’s like confiding
in one who does not reply.
This is what it’s like to invest
heart and hope in a letter no one reads.
To speak dreams into the air
and believe they will be captured,
nurtured, or at least beheld.
To whisper, How I love you,
Beloved, Beloved, how dearly I love you,
and believe the Universe embraces that devotion,
divides it into spectrums of light,
answers it on the voices of geese
and toads and locusts.
In the quiet spaces,
a coyote makes love to the moon
with a soul cry
that echoes off the ceiling
splattered with broken stars.
Ears pointed to the wet grass,
soft muzzle to the sky,
first a mournful solo
then the yipping of a lapdog
carries across the surface of the water
like a skipping stone.
Answer, all voices of the southern forest,
join the locomotive’s dragon blast.
Rise, rise to crescendo,
prophesy to me.
Now the train is coming,
coming, coming, coming,
here it’s coming, coming, coming
but from north or south I cannot say.
This is what it’s like to kneel
and stand and cross and bow
and recite to no one.
To say, The Lord be with you,
Then answer myself,
And also with you.
This is what it’s like to love
one unknown, unknowable,
yet all-knowing
and made known always
everywhere
in all things.
This is what it’s like to love a god.
This is what it’s like to love.
Speak to me through the songs of train cars
rushing north and south
between you and me,
with no cargo for us in their holds,
nothing to crate and load and haul,
only the message drawn from the tracks
the way horsehair moves over strings
trembling with hope and sadness,
visceral, compelling, seeming unceasing
for a while, it speaks,
Beloved, Beloved, Beloved.
Through the glass I see no steel, no crossties.
The train tracks lie somewhere else
across the creek,
beyond the trees,
past the ballfield lights
and the darkened school yard.
The train runs right through my
open chest.
JBT 03/2010
