Monday
This morning it’s the man lifting his bike
across the railroad tracks,
passing it up and over the chain link fence
like an awkward companion,
and then riding off, a dark figure
heading towards the vanishing point
of the concrete canvas I fancy
St. Mary’s parking lot’s become.
It’s in these gusts that ferry the weeds
and the three Target bags, blowsy
and transparent as jellyfish,
across the tracks and the deserted
lot behind him, and in the susurrus
of traffic rolling over the I-35 overpass,
where yesterday my student K drove
beneath the crooked legs of a man poised
to drop, the way a swimmer might
slip the pebbled edge of some suburban
pool. He didn’t, but still, she writes,
she felt her life divide between the moment
his shadow fell across her windshield
and all the ones to follow. I think it must
have been in the voices of the cops who
coaxed him down, and in their pulsing
squad car lights. In the eyes of the passersby.
I can feel it now, in the rising breeze
troubling the switchgrass and the chimes
strung from our porch. It’s in the stray cat
making for the light and sound leaking
from our windows. In the robin, watching.
— May 11, 2020
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