CALL ME BELOVED

I want to believe that trains are beautiful,
believe in the power of coming and going
and arrival – waiting arms and warm
long awaited embraces, or maybe
just the certainty in weight and speed,
the graffitied blur rushing by through
scratched plexiglass window panes.

I’m coming back to train stations, soon,
coming back to winter mornings, and
imagining I lived in all the towns I pass by.
I’m coming back to train poems, too –
the flavor of this month (once it was shoes),
not because I want to believe but because

I have to – it pulls me as irresistibly
as the impulse to write, pulling as strong
and as surely as steel wheels scraping down tracks,
like two sets of arms finding their way
through each other and around a lover’s back.