VIEWS OF THE FUTURE
I.
Two, one after the other, climbed
onto the bus—one daughter with long
brown hair and wearing a blue T-shirt
slightly too large and the older son
in a gray sweatshirt, clutching a bag
to his chest, wide-eyed. Their father
left them at the door of the bus,
squeezed his son’s shoulder as he
leaned towards the bus driver and
nodded, lips shaping the words
It’s okay. The son waved through
the window, shouted Bye dad!
Bye dad! and as we started to move
they took a seat, blowing kisses
to the man as he became a
passing blur. He blew them back
and grew smaller, more distant,
then invisible. From outside
the girl’s hand must’ve looked like
a cookie pressed to the glass. I imagine
she saw her own reflection against
the moving world, giddy with knowing
that today, today, she is on an adventure,
she is alone, how scary and how free.
Then she was talking laughingly and listing
names, Sadie, Eliana, Asher, Ella Delphine.
The boy fussed and said Stop, stop that,
stop, stop, stop! He was smiling.
II.
The eyes of the train sent prisms
of light into the blue shadows.
Everything, including herself
with stubborn fists, clung
to the September night. She knew
that time was being chased
downstream in a dusky river
without banks. She and her mother,
like two blazing candles on the mantle,
stood alone on the platform, nudging
elbows and radiating grief in violet
shafts. The silver doors slid open into
a view of the future, and she drifted
like a memory to the red leather seats
as her mother teased her with a jesting
dance, her feet gliding, their faces
mirrored in laughter through the glass.
Soon she saw the blurring of lines
behind her reflected gaze, the turning
of time into watercolor, and as she
looked back again, her mother was
standing small and lonely against the blue,
eyes searching and back curved into
a question mark, a clay pot that had
splintered and everything was spilling out.