Winter

The ten o'clock train to New York;
coaches like loaves of bread powdered with snow.
Steam wheezes between the couplings.
Stripped to plywood, the stations' cement standing room
imitates a Russian novel. It is now that I remember you.
Your profile becomes the carved handle of a letter nife.
Your heavy-lidded eyes slip under the seal of my widowhood.
It is another raw winter. Stray cats are suffering.
Starlings crowd the edges of chimneys.
It is a drab misery that urges me to remember you.
I think about the subjugation of women and horses,
Brutal exposure. Weather that forces, that strips.
In our time we met in ornate stations
arching up with nineteenth-century optimism.
I remember you running beside the train waving goodbye.
I can produce a facsmile of you standing
behind a column of polished oak to surprise me.
Am I going toward you or away from you on this train?
Discarded junk of other minds is strewn beside the tracks.
Mounds of rusting wire. Grotesque pop-art of dead motors.
Senile warehouses. The train passes a station.
Fresh people standing on the platform;
their faces expecting something.
I feel their entire histories ravish me.

-Ruth Stone