I say goodbye to Edwin at Penn Station New York
before my train to Jersey leaves behind
the 18 hours we've just spent catching up, walking the Lower East Side,
having dinner, toasting the visit with Jameson shots,
crashing uptown,
then rising late to a catch-as-catch can brunch
in the tiny kitchen overlooking 102nd and Amsterdam,
before the ride together on the 3 express back to Penn.
In my Edison office for an unavoidable half-day's work,
I will call him on his cell to say I've safely arrived,
as if there was such treachery in merely crossing state lines,
but mostly to convey, in one quick message, if he's still underground,
how much, how much there is.
In the 96th St. Subway station, the sight of the Number 3 barreling up
the tunnel
had made me wistful, and I had turned to him and said,
"Maybe it's enough to just relive good visits, one after another,
seamlessly,
as if there were no gaps of normal drudgery."
"Low expectations,” he replied and smiled then,
the bristly stubble on his cheeks and chin,
slightly heavier than when he greeted me the previous evening,
now darkened where his face dimpled in the expression.
We stepped up, ready to get on.
Some day, perhaps in another year and a half,
in keeping with our average in-person contacts,
our recollections will tumble together like streams from different
sources,
a confluence of sorts, and we will laugh over something I or he said or
did
or didn't do, not sure of anything but that we were.
But there is always a recurrence.
"The decedent has an unshaven appearance with a beard stubble of one to
two days."
said the note in my father's autopsy report.
I imagined him plunked on the gleaming steel tabletop,
as clean and shiny as these new trains, his slack face
open-eyed,
as if surprised
at how much, how much there is.
Then, as quickly as I remembered, I forgot.
Because then or now, train doors slide open.
By shadows or fashion to a confluence of sorts,
faces pour in, faces pour out.
Paula Neves is a graduate student in English at Rutgers-Newark. She is the founder and editor of the Webzine Itinerant Muse at www.itinerantmuse.com. Posted January 2006.
