Johanniterbrücke Semi-Satori

For Rosmarie

Shuttlecock, shuttle bus, time shuttling on

As the year slowed itself on down, dissolving

To December's gray-grained mezzotint. Today

Was tram then bus then trolleybus then train,

Then reprised but rearranged a touch with time

At MacDonald's filling in for the train and

Now we were back to trolleybus as twilight

Came on before 5 and I took my boy

Back home from his networked day of transit.

The bus climbed up as the bridge rose to span

The Rhine, then the down, a slighter decline

To the west bank, coasting back to the city

As the sun signed off, saying it was gone to

Texas, leaving night free to tweak the levels

Of gray down to charcoal and as I sat

Beside him, the level of repetition

Reached saturation and the bus slowed down,

Time stretched and the slightest whiff of vastation

Swept over and through me in the scant seconds

It took to regain dry land. Then he began

To squirm beside me and the bus slowed down

In its real-time traffic to avoid the trams

At the far shore's intersection and my fog

Lifted, the world lurched back to normal tempo,

Leaving me somewhere I hadn't been. Nothing.

What I thought I knew, where I thought I'd been,

Who I thought I was, all of it wiped clean

Till I sat in my seat stripped down to where

My boy had been when I first picked him up

Ten minutes after he was born. Nothing.

Not quite ten seconds, with no revelation

At its end as I felt his flesh which is mine

Remind me to come back. No, more than nothing.

I remembered how one of the Habsburgs,

One of their Maximilians, wine-stung to verse,

Graffitied his poem upon the wall

Of a Weinstube: "Live? Don't know how long. Die?

Don't know when. I'm astonished at

How happy I've been." Not nothing, just beyond

Us, tangible as breath, as turbulent.

Curbside Review, Nov., 2000. Posted with permission.