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imagine the poem I want to write
as a train into the city on which
one day I open my mouth to speak
and every stone has vanished
and the snake I once used to dig
for chipmunks in the yard has withered
like an old wrung washcloth dropped onto the sand

I want to tell those riders to write marks onto the dirty
speeding windows with their fingers, those who shout
the children down or pat about their persons for extra change
who smell of bar lamps and abandoned wine glasses
or pace the lane between the seats with drought in their eyes

so that as the trains passes with its electric insides snapping
and I go back to the sun that rubbed its light dark then yellow
on those windows I remember with tree branches and the unseen
leaf green, how the sun would come and go but with a geometry
provoked by the wind and the tree and the leaves

and then the cars end and the sun goes down
and I’m left on the dry tracks with the poem I wanted
to write hiding behind my hands, now in my palm,
between my fingers or leaping to the back of my head
or other places the poem can hide behind when
I try to remember the poem I want to write
and the train is nothing but a waiting signal lamp