[New-Poetry] All aboard!

[jforjames at aol.com]

STATION


We are saying goodbye
on the platform. In silence
the huge train waits, crowding the station
with aftermath and longing
and all we've never said    
to one another. He shoulders
his black dufflebag and shifts
from foot to foot, restless to be off, his eyes
wandering over tinted windows where he'll sit
staring out at the Hudson's platinum dazzle.   


I want to tell him he's entering into the light
of the world, but it feels like a long tunnel
as he leaves one home, one parent


for another, and we both
know in our bones it won't ever   
be the same again. What is the air at,
heaping between us then
thinning to nothing? Or those slategrey birds
that croon to themselves in an iron angle
and then take flight — inscribing  
huge loops of effortless grace
between this station of shade and the shining water?


When our cheeks rest glancing against each other,
I feel mine scratchy with beard and stubble, his
not quite smooth as a girl's, harder, a faint fuzz   
starting — those silken beginnings I can see
when the light is right, his next life
in bright first touches. What ails our hearts? Mine
aching in vain for the words
to make sense of our life together; his   
fluttering in dread
of my finding the words, feathered syllables
fidgeting in his throat.


In a sudden rush of bodies
and announcements out of the air, he says     
he's got to be going. One quick touch
and he's gone. In a minute
the train — ghostly faces behind smoked glass — 
groans away on wheels and shackles, a slow glide
I walk beside, waving     
at what I can see no longer. Later,
on his own in the city, he'll enter the underground
and cross the river, going home
to his mother's house. And I imagine
that pale face of his   
carried along in the dark glass, shining
through shadows that fill the window
and fall away again
before we're even able to name them.


--Eamon Grennan
Relations: New and Selected Poems (1998)



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