In lucid moments, she would speak
about lost nights, dungareed vagrant in the outskirts,
dreaming through girders beneath the crust of sidewalk,
waking only when the train stopped at Utica.
Arms signaling in front of her, she would rush along the rat tracks,
blue sheets of newsprint lifting in the heat.
Think back to the vacant house where she cut off
her hair: plaster scraps, blown-rose wallpaper,
folding oak ceilings, and the time
they found her even higher, in a garden on the roof
of a parking garage. Doctor Moses says
this pain leaves you the way she is left:
It never kills. Two months out of the halfway house,
she would hide inside on summer nights, lie
in the sofa's white embrace, searching its arabesque
with her nail. There were no rungs along her arm, her wrist.
But I am sure I knew more: She was the oldest,
platinum hair and a gorgeous complexion.
They said: college, marriage ahead. We would watch
her laughing, smoking, stepping into Saabs,
drawing in her silky leg. I've been searching
a landscape of cut black tunnels and moon-flooded
windows, checking the trash bars and alleyways,
asking. Along a rusty rail beneath a street-level train car
on its side like the carcass of a beast, I find tough, yellow,
cottony flowers twisting from chinks in the tracks, and part
of me urges: Let me let her go. Let her be.
This poem originally appeared in Natural Bridge.
