What, he wondered in his beer,
would the Zen masters do?
Did their hearts break
like everyone else’s?
Did they drive past their
ex’s house at two a.m.
to see if the light was on
in the bedroom window?
He drew a deep slow breath
and focused on the rhythm
of his own heart,
until a freight train split the night,
blasting towards Brattleboro,
making the whole world shake.
He wondered who
was driving that train,
headed towards home
or away from it?
Did the engineer know
where love goes when it dies?
Or how it was possible that
hummingbirds can cross the ocean
while words can fail to fly
a half pillow’s distance?
And those cold winter nights,
when snow obscured the tracks,
did the engineer lose faith?
That the rails would be there?
That the bridges would hold?
That there really was a Vermont?
That there really was a train,
and the clickety clack
wasn’t just the sound
of the heart moving towards
the vanishing point,
growing fainter, beat by beat?
Neither engineer nor Zen master,
he spent his nights in bars,
thinking how love fills the veins
with neon until you glow.
How love enters like the day
Houdini was born, amid
nurses in fishnet stockings,
doctors in top hats and tails,
asking for silence as they
levitated mother Houdini,
passed a brass hoop around her
while she pushed and groaned,
the calliope playing
merrily until suddenly
and with great flourish, the doctors
pulled from between her legs
a bouncing 7 lb. white rabbit,
and the hospital gasped,
as a baby was heard to cry
from inside a padlocked cabinet
in the next room. Love’s arrival
always astonished him,
after so much pain and gnashing
of teeth, presto --- ta da!
Then one night he looked
out the bar room window
to where his dog waited
for him in the snow,
some nights so long a cap of white
formed on her head,
and by this realized it does not
matter how love arrives.
With apologies to Houdini,
that was not the trick.
The miracle was how love stays,
enduring and steadfast,
loyal as the gentle beast
who ever at his side asked only
to be included, fed,
walked, giving in return
more love than could
reasonably be asked for,
logically expected,
or credibly deserved.
