Andante

After your letter, I hoped to translate, 
if I could, apples and bread into dark open streets. 
That girl in Heidelberg drew a black line, 
white paper against the shed door, 
drawing that night into a curve, 
and it was working so far: 
closure over the fields, closure seeping 
through the cars. The man across the aisle 
leaned into the open window, trees in rhythm 
of threes, of fives, as in a time songs will start 
sufficing again; a door opens into an open 
window onto open light, white space. 

After your letter, I heard the train 
weld the long, slow fixtures of towns, 
and it’s been like this — 
a long, serious connection, 
as when your mother 
waited the seams between trains, 
the ease of late-night cigarette haze 
over your body, over your clothes, over 
your eyes as you slept. 
White birds sift through the dream 

and I recognize them, hearing 
saxophone in the early morning heat: 
how it is, God’s gait over the world, how 
it fractures into song. In Amsterdam 
the Chinese men gambled, blue motion 
under the lamps: faith. And I’ve seen, 
in the gutting back home, 
the callow, yellow, opaque organs as entire 
and not without cause, blood smeared 
like memory in the ribcage. 

What keeps me close to mine? 
A month of November. 
Sun over, moon over you.