And then the gray concrete of the subway platform, that shore
stripped of all premise of softness
or repose. I stood there, beneath the city’s sequential grids
and frameworks, its wrappings and unwrappings
like a robe sewn with birds that flew into seasons of light,
a robe of gold
and then a robe of ash.
All around me were briefcases, cell phones, baseball caps,
folded umbrellas forlorn and still glistening
with rain. Who owned them? Each face possessed a hiddenness.
DO NOT STEP ACROSS THE YELLOW LINE; the Transit Authority
had painted this onto the platform’s edge
beyond which the rails
gleamed, treacherous, almost maniacal,
yet somehow full of promise. Glittery, icy, undead.
Sharp as acid eating through a mask. I counted forward
in my mind to the third rail, bristling with current,
hissing inside it like a promise or a wish; and the word
forward as if inside it also,
as if there were always a forward, always somewhere else
to go: station stops, exits, stairways opening out into the dusty
light; turnstiles and signs indicating this street
or that. Appointments. Addresses. Numbers and letters
of apartments, and their floors. Where was it, that thing I’d felt
inside me, tensed for flight
or capture, streaked with the notion of distance and desire?
And the people all around me, how many hadn’t
at some time or another curled up in their beds with the shades drawn,
not knowing how to feel the forwardness, or any trace
of joy? Wing of sorrow, wing of grief,
I could feel it brushing my cheek, gray bird
I lived with, always it was so quiet on its tether.
Then the train was finally coming, its earthquaky
rumblings building through the tunnel, its focused light
like a small fury. Soon we would get on, would step into
that body whose headlights obliterate the tunnel’s dark
like chalk scrawling words onto a blackboard.
I looked down at the hems of the many dresses all around me,
they were so bright! Why hadn’t I noticed them before? Reds
and oranges and blues, geometrical and floral patterns
swirling beneath the browns and grays of raincoats,
so numerous, so soft: threshold, I thought, and lullaby, disclosure,
the train growing louder, the feet moving toward the yellow
line, the hems billowing as the train pulled up,
how they swayed and furrowed and leapt
as if a seamstress had loosed them like laughter from her hands –
Laurie Sheck, b. 1953 – “Headlights” from Black Series
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