The sun, a hot vessel sparking trees over water,
does not concern itself with partings.
This is more comforting than you’d imagine.
If we were standing on a long dock with a wet dog
wriggling along, I would watch the flaming ship and say:
that’s the best part. Everyone is saved.
But there is no ocean here, only woods gossiping about
plastic exposives and fall. Salvation in the face
of a sunset is the strength to watch it all, to then
get back to business without the silence pulling you apart.
I don’t have it. I invite the quiet into the cracks.
You might. I know so little of your thoughts
about a sunset, about what opens us at the close.
Three years and I can barely see the golden hinges.
Your mother tells you to wear the virgin around your neck
so the devil doesn’t pull you off the train –
can you imagine
a string of virgins, bare beneath blue headscarves?
They flap perfect freckled hands at the dangers of long island,
stroke your collarbone with the rhythm of summer’s last taps
against the window, the beats of the final storm.
Tonight we ride out the echoes. Tonight, between worry
and dreaming, the ship will hit the bottom.
Years later after the armchair editor in my head
has snipped through film roll number seventeen
I will see you setting up camp, our rambunctous goodbye,
the long drive home. The colors will be spectacular –
teenagers used to live in a world like an overexposed photo.
But for now I am left with the tugging image
of a quick kiss, then me riding shotgun to the laundromat
and watching you walk up the dark driveway, alone,
already two hours away.
