CHRISTMAS IN WASHINGTON

I.

it happens on a thursday while i stand soaked in an afternoon rain underneath a few indelible clouds which deny and reject stray autumn rays too weak to push their way through

and the weight of a passing bus bears itself into a puddle showering dirty water all over and i am waiting patiently for the white outline of a hollow man to signal me across so i can meet her

and even through suffering through the uncomfort of cold wet clothes sticking to warm skin i can still mutter to myself that it's all okay, i'm okay;

i am mostly water, anyway

II.

what i do know:

sharing isn't in our blood.

we weren't born selfless.

no one has to teach us how to take and
want what's not ours;

we weren't made to remember all the
people we meet on the street,

especially the foreign souls we don't
love or know,

for more than sixteen minutes at a time.

and the settlers (make no mistake) they didn't leave for anyone else
but themselves, and maybe the children playing in the vast unpolluted
pasture with their hoops, sunday afternoons after church, blonde locks
overflowing tight white bonnets

they didn't roll forward onward across the new found land passing
families whose wagons were burnt and broken, whose exposed rotting
flesh were made a meal of by ravaging birds for

anyone but themselves:

they just rolled on by, not one look back;

they didn't even flinch


III.

now that you're gone i recognize that this moment and experience can't be translated into just any language (be that the spanish spoken in some particularly green valley of southern andalusia or the ukranian spoken over vodka in a tenement house, or the verse and rhythym of your fluttering eyelashes when you'd sigh in bed)

sharing is not what we do; memories experienced alone shouldn't be shared (they won't mean the same to anyone else), so i want to keep them for myself

hold onto them, just like i hold onto this one:

the image of a tiny shiny aluminum gum wrapper falling out of your patterned purse gone unnoticed to all the passerbys

how it flew away into the wind on a fall evening as an early twilight erased the shadows

how it was like a paper airplane off to some ignored destination,

how you walked away and got on the bus, disappeared into the orange glow of tall street-lamps

how you hummed to yourself, staring off into the distance through the tinted bus window and how you went off

without a sound

to washington