CALL ME BELOVED

Stay close to me, now,
as I try to chase myself down,
to grab onto something solid.
I haven’t chosen the imagery that flickers off and on
throughout these lines, no more than I chose the balance
of joy and sadness – maybe the words themselves choose.

My poems are still fascinated by trains,
born and raised in the railyards, now, welling up
like a silent sob in your throat as an express train
explodes past the platform, sound and fury impossibly close
and just as quickly gone, almost leaving you guessing
was it here? (Am I here?)
Is it gone? (Where am I going?)

I cannot seem to get the right words down,
so instead I let them go into the station –
make their skeletons out of marble tile, legs out of
grand, stone pillars – and as my hands graze all the way
down the bronze handrails I work whispers into the metal,
gleaming and polished by thousands and thousands of hands.

I sit on the benches and stare down the line,
following the rails until they disappear around the bend,
like staring out into the ocean –
a sea of concrete ties and steel,
and I wonder.

Maybe the saddest poems are the easiest to write
because we seek them out with our own gravity,
patient and methodical,
like the seeing-eye dog’s footsteps
down the walkway below the platform,
pulling the woman slowly out the doors.