North to Smoked Stories

I will write about trains and how their wrecks
turn into flecks of bronze between your eyelids
When we found each other in shades of disorder
And tangled arms and tangled legs
Roped themselves towards a common end


I will write about how once, the travesas
Turned into your backbone, pliant and arched
And how our mouths let off steam, careening
To unknown regions, North to smoked stories
Telling us that May should have died, and us along with it
Southern, where we burned the maps that told us
Where to stop our abandonment


But mostly, I will write about how we passed several lifetimes
before this, of grasslands that blurred on such short a course
and that side by side, we become oblivious to rushing
without fear, And each other
even when the earth intrudes our stares


This morning, the day called to us
Slipping underneath our feet
Lost to schedules, visions of passage


We have missed it long before it left