I’d been myself before and returned.
I knew what I wanted, waiting for
the same train I never got on.
If I asked myself when my mother died,
I would have answered, “She always dies now,”
so I asked instead about the next train,
and Time’s keeper explained, “They call them departures,”
and he pointed to the inside weather, which was
leaving for Pittsburgh and didn’t bother to wave.
“The reason I’m late doesn’t belong to me,”
I said to the eastern skyline, and waited.
Someone new was leaving. I knew that.
I was wearing a white shirt of no intention.
I could have been just like me, but I knew
what I wanted, and I knew it didn’t ask.
