The reliving now worse than the living
But your motives pure
as salt

There are two heights
the height of the bridge and the height you feel
standing below it

Now we must discuss regret

The undertow
Sandpaper clothes
Descending to the bottom
Rip tide, the shiver of it

Or

Has this always been about
discipline

Spending half your life building a bridge
plank by plank
The next half patiently
watching it burn

There are two wants
the one you want
and the one you want to want

Something about sink or swim
Something about stop, drop, and roll

Maybe it was
Don’t hold your breath

Or

     just below the water's surface
     two fur seals weave past each other
     their slick bodies heaving up into the sunlight
     the ocean like a dirty jewel melted
     and poured beneath them

     and a rabbit who has learned to fear
     the shadow of the hawk
     and not the hawk
     darts toward a bush covered in tart red berries
     and disappears underneath

     and thousands of caribou plod head-down into the mist
     through grasses that extend to the end of the earth

     and one bear ventures out into a field of snow alone
     heavy paws damp and crusted with ice
     and pauses for a moment, his hot breath the only sound
     in a forest without birds

If we entered a grocery store and Julian was not allowed to tie his shoe before we selected a cart, or we selected the wrong cart, or we walked down the produce aisle instead of the cereal isle, and he was confident the cereal isle was not one to be missed, then he would demand we start over. We would have to walk back outside into the Arizona heat and enter the store as if for the first time, following his proper procedure.

Though my parents struggled to delight in Julian's mastery of this concept, I was mystified. I hadn't yet learned to bend space-time in this way. Things would happen, even things I didn't like, and I had to live with it.

How simple we must have looked to him,
tethered to displeasing circumstance,
forced to live one life one time.

You must be wondering who rakes the moon
Who makes the moon
The seemingly arbitrary arrangement of craters and valleys
Unspeakable valleys, dusty hallways between cliffs
Perfectly curved basins, the puckered edges catching the light
During a monthly sunrise
Dark, unmoving seas of shadow

We are the moonrakers, the diggers
Careful with our light feet, our fine tools and shovels maria-powdered
And this is what we know:
An asteroid deserves its crater,
Our years of work the work of mirrors
A good work, fair

But who are you, landing so gently,
coming with your fat prints
The harsh parallel lines of the sole
You, with your round glass helmets
with which you reflect so much more gracefully
Everything you know

The engine ignites with a deep roar—
the blasting white noise of a commercial jet's takeoff
with the crackling licks of a forest fire,
miles away but still vibrating in my chest.
They say it's like there's not enough space for all that sound.
White smoke grows thick around the platform
as if simply to highlight the event,
to say 'Here something otherworldly will take place,'
like that which marked the comings and goings of witches
in the Wizard of Oz.

And as I watch this, I am reminded
of meteoroids hurling through space at 150,000 mph
striking the moon in small chalky splashes,
a comet ripping past the sun with its frostbitten tail
the blue giant, its solar flares 30 Earths long lapping at the darkness,
two planets colliding, a ring of debris screaming outward—
all this happening, and happening
in an absolute silence.

This will not be understood
by people like you—
people who, when cold,
set fire to buildings.

Who the woman who wipes
the glass mouth
after each of her kisses

Who the glass man
just wanting to be able to see out
his mouth

like the driver
like the driver in the rain

Who the woman
coming up against the cold glass
like the rain
like the hot, Spring rain

The pool listens from under its blue tarp
hears nothing
the trees stare as if
they don’t recognize me

watching steam
rise off my arms and chest

I say, Woods you know me
They say, Not like this

Learned to become cold-blooded is all, I say
as if I could fool them,
throwing off steam like a damp sun

They ask, What is cold?

and I laughed,
because when you define cold for trees
you can’t say shivering
or numb

You have to feel what a tree would feel
see light as food
warmth as feeling full

and cold would be no leaves with which to eat
cold as forgetting how to eat
how to even want to
cold as the wind slipping through you
with no trouble,
nothing to catch on

Oh no, they say, You are warm!
You are warm! they say, like the children of a sad parent

I ask, Then how can I make it out here? in the cold?
and they think for a minute
as I stare up into the light
a few moths on the bulb

Because you’re asking, they say.
Because you can still feel it.

The train is already hot and running when Hank has to jump in. Driving the express isn’t how he’d imagined it when they first offered him the job. He’d fantasized there’d be a kind of peace one couldn’t find in local, midday transit: the passengers silent veterans accustomed to the long stretches of morning thought that come with intercity travel, and the shifts so early that whoever makes the world each morning wouldn’t be finished yet—still throwing down the last bit of track, spraying some dew onto the side window, attaching the final tree leaves. Instead, Hank wakes to a ready-made world, one already good and worn by the time he opens his eyes. The roads are always flush with taillights. John usually pulls in a few minutes past five, throwing a nod Hank’s way as he hops out. The cab is a vibrating, roaring box. With few switches and fewer knobs, operating a train is like being inside a predatory animal’s head: what little control one has is all that’s needed. It’s mostly instinct.

Hank sits in his chair, the fabric of which was once blue, but has grayed under many an engineer. At the conductors’ signals, he grips the acceleration lever with his right hand, pushes it forward, and the train lurches. The station falls back over his shoulder and the tracks vanish under the nose of the train. The track ahead winds past Christina River, the handful of glass-faced high-rises downtown, grocery stores with their lights just crackling awake. Cars wait on either side of the tracks on perpendicular streets. Hank passes the drivers too quickly to see their faces, but he imagines them sipping coffee, leaning over to their radios when talk-show hosts announce commercial breaks. Cars, Kate. Kate dropping him off at the station earlier. Kate crying into the remote last night when she couldn’t find the volume buttons, Kate hugging herself on the other side of the bed, Kate biting her lip as she presses the knife through Hank’s bologna sandwiches, Kate. She would just have to get over it, Hank decides. He’d been married to her for almost five years. Marriage made him feel older than 35, but he didn’t have much of a desire to be young. Young men were always coddling the Kates of this world, always asking what the fucking matter was, always dropping everything to help when there wasn’t really anything to be done. Each passing house marks another 50 feet further from her, and he begins to relax. He reaches to the back of his neck and rubs a knot in his muscle.

Before his parents died, Hank told them he’d never get married, never have kids. They were seated around the dinner table like ambassadors of countries on the brink of, at the very least, embargo. Hank’s dad had been an engineer, too, but the kind who would build trains, not “push a button.” Hank’s mom had taken to ordering products from the television and was perpetually shaking off the last thing her husband said. Hank ground his cigarette butt into the glass ashtray as he told them, and when he looked up, they didn’t say a word. His father rolled his eyes as he tipped back the last sip from a beer can.

Then he met Kate. She had brought some summer vacation film to be developed at the ShopRite by his apartment and was picking it up while Hank waited on line behind her. She drummed her fingernails on the counter, which meant she was a girl who wanted attention and Hank knew enough about that kind of girl to know he shouldn’t give her any. When the man handed her the photos, she peeled out a few to check them over. Hank saw they were beach photos, saw the black bikini, the smack of light across her thighs. He turned on the sweet and brought her home that night, thinking that’d be all there was to it. Keep it short, keep it honest. But she kept surfacing all over town—the bank, the auto-body shop, the movies— and he’d know it was her before she even turned, her straight blonde hair like a dim flame he could never snuff. At first, she’d pan over his face like she didn’t recognize him. They’d exchange pleasantries though she just as easily could’ve been making conversation with a stranger in a dentist’s waiting room—bored, with air to fill.

When they met on the platform weeks later, she was different. He had just stepped out of the cab and was leaning against the station house, lighting his post-shift cigarette, when he saw her emerge a few cars down. She ought to know he’d driven her there, that she was there because of him—on-time, in one piece, all that— so he cut through the crowd to meet her. She pointed to his uniform, smiling. She’d just returned from her sister’s wedding, she told him. They walked to the parking lot together as she recalled some of the uglier decorations, the cheesy speeches. But all those couples dancing had kicked up some old dust for her, and a few salutational mimosas that morning had her thinking she liked Hank’s persistence, his hard jaw. She asked him about driving the trains, and he told her that sometimes it’s so loud in there and you can hardly think. You’ve got to make decisions with a train-full of people behind you.

The suburbs start to thin out as the forests close in on the manicured lawns. This means they’re in Maryland. Hank increases the train’s speed to 75 miles per hour. He glances at his clock, timing his arrival in D.C., and cracks open a can of soda, places it in the cup holder one of the other conductors had duct-taped to the siding. Kate had always laughed at him for drinking cream soda. Something about him being a little kid. It was one of the few sodas without caffeine that didn’t taste like medicine. Caffeine made Hank “worry about things no one has business worrying about,” as his dad would say, usually in reference to his whereabouts on a given Saturday afternoon. His dad wasn’t sneaking anything; he just didn’t like people asking questions for the sake of it. Hank wonders what the world would be like if everyone only spoke when absolutely necessary. Or if everyone was only allotted so many words in a lifetime. Quiet, maybe. He sips his soda. Each house looks like the next: white with dark shutters, hackneyed landscaping, toys erupting out the doors and windows. Whoever invented children was crazy, Hank thinks, and smirks. Kids, Kate. Kate talking about babies, Kate waving a little plastic stick in the air, claiming it was God telling them what to do, Kate. You remember that thing about Eve? he had asked her the previous night. How God made her ‘cause Adam was lonely? she snapped. What did she know about God? God’s never liked kids. Have you ever seen a kid try to sit through church? Let me guess, she said, and then Hank stopped listening. There are whole cities without Kate in them. Whole countries.

The sun is up, but still low enough for Hank to need the headlights, though they could never be turned off. He never understood why trains had headlights. By the time anything turned up in that light, it would already be too late to stop for it. Something about seeing, knowing, even if you can’t stop—people need that, Hank thinks. The tracks plunge into thicker woods and now there is only the occasional house, the kind with built-in swimming pools and custom-made decks. Made for the kind of people who can afford the quiet—quiet besides the sound of the train, of course.

This part of the track used to have a lot of local stops that are out of service now. Their elevated wooden platforms and small station houses are still there. Most are covered in graffiti and littered with empty malt liquor bottles. Hank tries to think about driving the train straight down to Florida, or at least taking some weekend shifts. Whole cities, whole countries. He tries to think about Florida beaches but Kate won’t stop, even now. Kate on the Rehoboth beach boardwalk, Kate squinting in the sun of their back porch, strawberries seeds in her toothy smile. Kate, warm skin. Kate in jean shorts at the movies, goose bumps on her forearms. Kate’s voice from under the covers, Kate laughing Kate. No, how Eve ruined everything with her damn curiosity, he had said, speaking over her. She threw the test at him and it bounced off his chest. Some urine flecked his cheek.

The orange light cuts through the trees and the pebbles packed around the tracks glow like hot coals. Hank reaches into his bag for a bologna sandwich and frees it from the plastic wrap. He leans forward to take a bite but decides he isn’t hungry and throws it back down into the bag. He tries to focus on the houses. Once she talked about wanting to move out here. She was bent over the sink, her sleeves rolled. The damp tips of her hair clung to her chest. He liked the idea of a long winding, wooded driveway, all that fresh air. But he’d known why she said it; she wanted some Better Homes and Gardens bullshit, with the puppy and the bibs and the ottomans. He didn’t marry this Kate. I just think it’s time I use this body, she said, meekly, not looking at him. I use it all the time, he teased, waiting for her head to snap up, for the splash of water, the thrown sponge, anything. It never came.

The train follows the track in a hard curve to the right, which means the abandoned Kingston station is a mile or so ahead. Hank sees something upright on the platform. As the train gets closer, he sees the figure is naked, a naked person, a woman. She is waiting on the platform, unmoving. Red hair, down to her waist. Hank slows the train a little, his eyes hanging off her. She remains facing the train. He is only a couple hundred feet away now, and the train’s light further illuminates her body—soft pink nipples, hipbones, dark patch of hair between her legs. Kate stepping out of the shower, Kate beneath him, Kate’s open mouth. The woman is barefoot, a heap of clothing next to her feet. He is closing in on the platform. She begins to run toward the track. Hank screams, resists slamming his palm down onto the red mushroom button. She leaps out, into the train’s path. She collides with the windshield, her legs splayed, her head exploding in blood. Her body falls away to the side of the train. Hank pulls the lever back towards him hard.

They spot half a mile down from the Kingston platform. Hank is shaking. He isn’t allowed to leave the train, but he stumbles out of the cab and sprints down the track, alongside the passenger cars, their little ugly faces staring at him, pointing. How could he not have known? How could it have been anything else? He doesn’t realize he’s crying until it becomes too hard to breathe, and he has to slow down his run, rubbing the wet off his cheeks with his sleeves. The look on her face a split-second before the blood: the open mouth, the eyes wide. He loses his footing in the gravel. The open mouth. Her face and then the blood. Her open legs.

Hank sees her body near the edge of the woods, slumped over, almost fetal. Her cracked head is cradled in her legs. She has no face. Her skin, so luminescent on the platform, looks gray. He couldn’t be blamed for this. The emergency break could have derailed them. He’d been told not to use it. But how could he not have known? Hank trembles and drops to his knees, places his hands on the cold rocks. He hears himself sobbing, his body heaving. How could he? He wants to move her, touch her, but does nothing. He’d just stared at her on the platform and did nothing. Just saw her pale body against the black thicket of trees in all that orange light, her red hair. That is how to use a body, he had thought. The idea makes him feel sick now. He vomits but little comes of it. He untucks his uniform shirt and wipes his face; the buttons scrape his mouth. Her shoulders are matted with blood, as is the gravel around them. Goddammit. He grabs her hand, holds it.

The way great kings want their reigns
to last forever in stone,
that is how I want my transcript to look:
a fat rock alone in a field,
placed upright against a gray sky,
holding it up.

If I walked into your office
and you were not there,
I would tell it to the crooked medieval tapestry
above your desk,
the sad-necked lamp over your chair,
the ribbed vermillion pillow,
the pastel drawing of a plant.

And if they were not there,
I would tell it to the shower head,
the mashed leaves under the park bench,
the spices lining the stovetop.

When we speak our facts aloud,
we place our stones,
yes, but—
when we speak our facts aloud,
then we hear them.

If I yelled at you
it’d be 5 years,

if I yelled for you
it’d be 4.

My throat a runway
on which a plane catches fire
and takes off still.