Meditation

Down the street, a woman passes time
under a calico sky blotched with orange.
Her son rips up onion grass and fills his mouth
with white bulbs. It doesn’t matter what he does.
The moaning of the 3:20 train…
Suicides haunt the scattered maples,
their leaves blue as storm clouds—
buried in those leaves, the story of a body,
a bad lover, bills. The train’s ghastly whistle,
sharp in the winter air. I want to turn back;
the comfortable bed; the dirty sparrows, fat as whiskey
bottles.
The night that I once believed beautiful, dishonest.