as i look on your struggle i remember
i have seen arriving from movie theaters
the forms of people
disgraced, slanting heavily out of the cold,
their coats, the muscles under the skin
fraying, given up to the air.
and later, near morning,
i have seen their figures compelled
from the panic and emptiness of the town asleep
into all-night diners, which flounder, exhausted.
outside the towns the wide plains
are delirious
with frozen animals,
and the sky is rising with moons and moons.
these faces lifted over the street
are not moons. even so, they are
lost somewhere between worlds and home,
in a town that can’t quite hold onto the earth.
i listen to your tiny,
unbelieving anguish,
and i wonder if i have known
these faces in another time;
and i think that you have come here, drifting
through universes of cold
because no longer, no longer
could the womb contain your loneliness.