because it has been a week and i still haven't called him back

First, there were dreams of crystalline horses in hiking socks

Catching the last train in the blizzard

To a deeper part of the storm--

5^th avenue shut down and blinking red lights highlighting a solitary figure

dragging a shovel behind him in the middle of the white street--

“if I have a bad day I say I deserve a drink and if I have a good day I say I can afford to drink.”

today josh has $100 dollars in savings,

contemplating giving up on josh the sportscaster

newsanchor daily beard trimmings

a learned puckering of the mouth and warm

laughter following everything he does not have

a ready response to.

Like the wind rush of a car, birds overhead

get a late start for winter or spring on this day.

My body lights up in 50 degrees asking to have socks off

And feel something.

Dreams of grandeur and pink sky in

The writer’s row home

Make a stunning set to the silent film,

Each in his room, computer whispering,

And the studio filled with a depressed woman and her lover

Trying to paint what can make it better or

Just paint it at all.

Harry potter was forbidden Josh

But he ended up gay anyway.

And without saying it,

There were no comics in my home on the edge of middle class boston

And my mother, who I love

Fought to change everything,

Not knowing much about what it means

to be an Italian construction worker

with a mortgage in the suburbs.

As the train starts past 52^nd street,

Josh’s head droops towards his phone

And he swipes his thumb right

Once, and then again.

I come home to a menorah by the window

Arcing its waxed back at the setting sun.

Young people are always outweighed.

But the whole future, with months of travel

And sex and snow and homelessness,

And something else is determined

by more odds than that.

The politicians are singing America now,

And the farmers are coming to the empty nest,

And the firestarters at university are hoarding PBR’s

And the dock workers are laying down their arms

And liberty herself is shrugging

As a thousand boats leave and a thousand boats come in

And every day is looking in the mirror saying

“I don’t feel so old as I look,

but I’m proud of what has marked me so.”

My grandmother was married in a letter to Iceland,

And she died in a queen size bed in marblehead, quietly,

With her rugs still white and everyone expecting

The EMT’s, or whoever came, to recognize her and say,

“Barbara, it’s been so long. You were so much then,”

then look at all of us with tears in our eyes

“and look at all you've made.”

Her china set is breaking,

Plate by plate,

Party by party as I grow older.

I had a dream the one who stole my heart first

Sat cross legged over the pieces,

Arranging dinner for us

Before we would take a long journey.

I input Josh’s story to the database late in the evening,

And clasp the duct tape on each end of the screen shut,

Hoping these great fragments will grow

And bond and change each other

Along with something I give

That pushes us towards something new.

Today I woke up and saw the man who drove the trolley

And all the ones who ride the 6:36 trolley

And I thought I caught a glimpse of a former friend

And then I saw the grand hotel Monaco

With its chandeliers spraying light into the snow

and I saw hundreds of people

Storming in for brunch to celebrate this Sunday

And then I saw my life as if from one of the windows way up

In one of the buildings in the city of dreams.

It looked lonely and driven,

And I looked tired and hungry

And had rough hands the size of small towns.

And I don’t know what to do with that.

“man,

but it gets cold quick in Philadelphia.”