To Sway
I To music, almost alone on a filled train
The shell of the train is filled to bursting sides.
Glimpse another’s eyes. Then shoes. Then floor.
Ignore the poor born with their hollow eyes.
Each hallowed soul cannot be seen, is blind
Perhaps. What can I know of anyone
I know? The slow train. The dull frenetic mind.
The dull frenetic mind, circling,
A step behind, then circling around
The tracks, a track stuck on rewind.
Then subtly the subway slides inside
The earth and every soul glows with the light
Of tunnels, running deeper than the urge
For breath. The new groan of the train’s brakes
Shakes us from the ground through feet to thighs
To mind to all thought, only thought, to mind
To finding eyes alive in subway caves
Meeting mine. Some vague undressing
Imagined. Almost true? Uncertain blessing.
II Uncertain and home, distant
Love has its birth in burden: caressed
In violence, the gasp, the rest,
The breast that only it can know this well.
Love swells in mothering. Love sinks, and still
Preserves itself—a nautilus. A shell.
A living thing. A live thing in its hill.
- Andrew Calis