Out the tunnel into wetlands
all around the last vestiges
of industrial revolutions past
the Pulaski skyway in the setting sun,
past Newark, HArrison
huge old factories abandoned!
i could live in this wasteland
every time i pass i see myself
in the remains of what is gone
when long beams of evening
and old brick touch
and make magic.
i remember one winter
we rode from Dessau to Dresden
past empty station houses and factories.
East Germany was like the apartment
of a widow left untouched since the passing
of the war.
and i told you as much. you understood.
within your own abandoned factories
your writer’s bed mat laid
near a smashed window
to dream.
today
after you said that to me
i knew you’d said it all:
"we both gave each other
great stuff"
if anyone took advantage
it was Love who saw a fine but tragic pair
in us. and we were willing
as if our willingness pre-existed our first meeting
or most simple knowledge of the other’s existence.
who saw between us a distance that will not be bridged
in life– the distance between Adam’s finger and God’s–
they are one on another ceiling– the sky–
intersecting in the limit to infinite.
alone on the train i am most myself
amid these ruins of industries past
that self lives a simple life with little desire
to possess anything or anyone;
but to sit beside a small fire with you
in a place so abandoned by the world
beneath unending sky that reflects us
as it reflects the ocean by day. to say to you,
"because i have seen these things
the sun setting behind silhouettes of smoke stacks
I have lived."
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