Shifting

If you ask me where I’m going I will answer: the inner city is my arena

but I have lived where no one calls my name survival was not a matter of question but a question of matter who I am meant nothing to no one but to a hidden self below buried tracks

if you ask me where I’m going in this corridor of trains on a straight line to history my answer is : there is no such event as a transitional shunt

not after leaving an empty house verbs become halves of door knobs where there is no closure

I look over this draft startled to find I was absent so many thoughts slipped by train windows like electric poles obliterated thorny weeds and rails in a steel green blur but something in the journey of that engine insisted I pick up these prepositions just as you draw the pieces of myself into some semblance of a structure in the pulsating labyrinth in which both of us can live

now if you ask me where I’m going I’ll answer in time after these many years counting becomes irrelevant writers cannot add when thoughts multiply

letters to and from you are doves in this arc we have we explore unknown waters through the silent efficiency of the mail service

though I try to capture all thoughts of you I want to write, I let shifting priorities of such mundane crises prevent me from training straight to your heart

now I send you this revised work first written in a railway car returning from being with you at a time when being with you was the only time the lights were on there was somebody home.