Twilight Greenaway

Commute

           To make substitution or exchange. To pay less upfront.
To travel as a single vertebrae in the body of a steady snake.
The same trip like a sibling, hated in the morning,

           loved in afternoon. We slip silent over jagged bay inlets,
this Pacific-once-removed. Or the braking breaks us.
Stutters the worst from each of us.

           In the rain, we imagine the land like it was before becoming
these banks of road. Knobby-kneed birds on the edgeline inch closer.
Native grasses look stiff and outnumbered.

           What is left of ourselves, our outdoors.
And yet when watching a flood of orange morning headlights
from behind, they always look warmer

           than the ones coming toward on the down slope,
in the low drizzle. We carry it, each in a private indoors,
then bring it home at the end of the day.

           We get the blurred background we pay less for.
But like to imagine at least several flights of stairs between
what lives and merely looks the part.

           To notice the negative space as it opens.
This knocking, at once loving the wall,
while preparing to hammer.

San Francisco 2007

The waves bruise with what rises
and blurs, like an appendix,
that worm of an add-on,
when it bursts, and just as black.

Soon, the skimming away at our
comfort, our rising debt.

We, too, will spill open
and black up the edges,
saturate down to the wings,
and put forth put forth put forth.

The days of restrained,
containable using up are through,
but we have gallons left to gush.