Fleetingly Revealed

outside the legion:
american flag

Fleetingly Revealed

And we, spectators always, everywhere,
looking at, never out of, everything!
It fills us. We arrange it. It collapses.
We re-arrange it, and collapse ourselves.

                                                     Rilke
                                                     Duino Elegies 

Two, like they were the only

and owned if not the proverbial whole

world at least the spaces

they crouched in cupping the end of whatever it was

to get it to fire to let them draw

in the hot of it while their bags soaked

up the puddles of slush.  They were so close

to the road.  A woman in a pushed back red knit cap

and her dreads cascading down her open

puffy coat, her spiny throat and collar bone.  

It was probably, if even, upwards to thirty

degrees.  And a man, his back

to me, covering her hands

with his, her knees his knees brought up

to her cheeks in an intimacy I’d see

only later, right now in fact, her whole life

story brought to an almost halt just feet

from the three in the afternoon street these

two people reflected back to me

like they were each of these things: muddy
puddle and breaking sky and all the wind in it and fire

most of all fire, though if it were the sun

or the lighter I’m not sure

I’d be able at all to tell and if I could even

explain the difference.

Behind them, behind us all, there are trains,

rusting relics of another age.  And churches. 

Some old duffer’s huffing up the stairs

in his basement conversion.  What was once

a mill.  What once rose up hand-laid brick, now 

withered, her summer seeds still in the mortar.

And some judge is bringing down

his gavel in his last case of the day, and maybe

whoever they are will get out and look up or down

and see something they’ve never seen

before, all of them, or maybe they’ll crouch

on the edge of a busy street and try to get lit

like they were the only ones in the world

in this whole wide rising falling down world.