and the world around me was like
a drowsy clerk’s office where one rheumy
intern made jokes and the other
kept interrupting my stories with stories
about his own childhood which was
far sadder than mine and had taken
a long time to reach us so full
of banquets, sirens and retractions
that we stopped to play cards for a time
by the service entrance with a view
and when he continued he spoke plainly
of several hundred years of pain, toolsheds
and drifting snow and the other intern,
a halfwit, and I huddled closer
and from the small bits of his story
we imagined the girlfriends and snowmen he once knew
and the moon lodged above a notebook
unable to breathe as a stranger
entered an emptying station
and cut his initials swiftly into a bench.