The words float up, overheard and incomplete on the train
from Stamford to Grand Central. She’s in the huge days,
so close to her next life she can’t sit right, hot all the time,
heat like a second skin. She glows because she’s a forge
with two legs and no windows. The train shakes stone passages
shaved from the hillside, back yards, broken bikes, parking lots
with evenly-spaced trees, all lost in opaque orange soup,
smoke from Canada’s burning woods. That city smell, sour
and salty, is turned to soot. A terrible autumn, a bad movie
set on Mars, and we’re on the express into the thick of it, we
invincible white women in blazers. Dark, she said, and something
about earth as kin. Above this orange curtain, the sun is where
it’s always been. I’ve heard it said that darkness is not an ending
but a womb. The call, then, to push, to take what’s next
by its hand and mother it. This train is loud with too many voices.
Dark, she called us, as even now in the dark of her body, a body
pulls itself together from all she has to offer, spark, mineral,
clay. Soon awful work, warm work, thankless, necessary, wonder
work, and always more of it. She’ll have to make friends with
the dark, ask it for a story to help her sleep, hear it say “no."
.