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.