Outside, a delicate arch
Of steel rises above
The desolate streets, and westward
The river’s long-since-fallen
Water lies darkly quiet,
Holding in a broad lap
Golden lights from rewarding
Shores, showered in payment.
Slowly the moon-tied flow tugs
Downward; everything runs
Unstopped out of the bay.
Inside, the yellow lights
Of the hopeless IRT
Die for a second, as car
By car, the train blacks out,
Moment echoing moment.
They stand at the front window
Watching the opening tunnel
That crashes into their faces.
She is a week late.
They are waiting to stop waiting
For something inside to happen.
On the surface of it,
A blessing will come in time,
Falling on her one morning
When they are separate;
When they meet that evening
She will tell him sweetly
On the wide street, in the spill
Of fluorescence from the grocer’s:
“It’s all right now” “I thought so”
Blessed in the change, they scamper
Uptown toward a shining corner.
Blessed? Cursed? Or merely
Commanded to be? To issue
Forth from love’s subway
Is to reclaim a world
Not lost, but checked at an entrance:
Their fear’s sole issue only
The delayed mundane omen,
They move from depth to surface,
Over the skin-deep avenues
Then, along and across them.
And so on. And so forth.
But, at bottom, that light
Will again be revoked.
As when the moon’s dark falls
Across the tar of rooftops,
Gathering the pale shadows
Of a long fortnight past,
There in the wheal and flare
Of another underground
Tube, the shadows of coming
Shadows mold their cheeks,
Their bright, unhollowed eyes.
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