A ferry curls back
the harbor as the train
angles
away, streetside and waterfront,
platform
and cold decks deserted alike
in the
parchment haze of latest fall.
Past the
windows, the only witnesses
recede
into landscape: a curb-parked
police
car, half a dozen shirtsleeved boys
straddling bicycles in the pale sunset,
a halt
of Canada geese in a still-green field,
one
sentinel and ten pilgrims for the south.
The salt
marshes reflect the same stolen blue,
skimmed
peachily as the horizon; each cove
in its
tide-blackened backing of stones holds
the sea
breathing endlessly onto the sand.
Unharvested, the cordgrass rolls in swells
of
tundra and tiger stripes, mirror-eyed,
broken
to islands: each river’s mouth
craned
with industry, cat’s-cradled to rust
and
stand through freeze and flooding tides;
the
bridges anchor their shadows in the sea.
The
eastern moon hangs higher than the sun.
The
roads thicken homeward, clotting
asphalt
to highways and high-voltage wires
and
pigeons flutter up rather than gulls
as the
train pulls in: the last of the sun fires
the
skyline’s windows like the tips of waves.
