Even the tree outside the station
is too much
if I let it happen all at once:
water climbing through the dark of wood,
each leaf a different bargain with the sun,
a mockingbird fitting a car alarm
between two borrowed songs.
My body keeps what it can use:
a tree, some shade,
somewhere to wait.
It has been saving me like this
longer than I have been alive.
Through the eyes of the dead
I find the fruit among the leaves,
the face among the faces.
I am late. I want coffee.
I want you to be glad to see me.
In my pocket, something without a childhood
has solved a problem
a dead man left for centuries of others.
The answer fits beneath the weather.
All summer it has been like this.
A bus exhales beside the curb.
Someone is laughing with a voice
that took a whole life to arrive at.
In the gutter, ants divide
the soft, enormous body of a moth.
There is no end to looking closer.
There is nowhere it becomes simple.
For a moment I cannot make the leaves
become a tree again.
The light changes.
In my pocket, the next answer
opens inside the one I have not finished.
Above me, the bird adds something
I have never heard before.
I wait for the alarm to come back.
The light changes again.