THE ORBIT STRANGE

I forget if I’m standing on the emptied parking lot or the moon
But I would’ve imploded by now so I step with care toward the road.
Beneath my feet beneath the ground, the mountains
Thaw early and bleed loudly through the sewer.
My menacing eyes pursue the sound, drain after drain up the street that grows ether
Either into the river, the city, or the forest.

I intersect Main.
Two vertical traffic lights, stare straight at me,
Madly red from the top of the hill, and the double yellow street lines spill down
At my feet like the divided tongue of a giant snake, poised to strike
And I can’t tell if I’m already in its gaping mouth walking out
Or bait slumped and sagging in its feeder’s pinch.

As a child I never would have roamed into a strange forest this late.
The idea of monsters I never believed in on TV disturbed me,
Especially when I walked home at night alone. However, right now
I tell myself I’m not afraid of anything and step across Main into the absence of light.
The moon passes through clouds so far above me it looks like a weathered penny,
Walked on by all of us. Dead currency held in disregard.

I hear the steady flow of drainage again and can smell attrition at my heels where spots of Moonlight trace the cement where the cement turns into dirt and the dirt sits beneath Rotten snow all the way up the buried path where old houses
Are tucked deep in the thick woods.
Reminded of home, I hear my Dad recite Frost from memory.
Time is transitory and if I could I’d locate the moon in relation to the stars and tell myself Where I was in the continuum. My coordinates are fleeting
And the cloud cover’s heavy. The city lights reflect
Off the stomach of the slow low hanging sky.

If you asked, I couldn’t tell you what size my carbon footprint is.

Distant trains drone past on newer tracks as I walk
With the dilapidated railway hidden beneath
Homeless peoples refuse and trucks so rusted
They could have been submerged in salt water for centuries.
It’s too dark to distinguish cinder blocks from toeless shoes
That stick out from under what I think are hospital beds.
The nearest hospital is across the bridge.
I don’t usually, but tonight I’m smoking a cigarette and each time I pull
I don’t feel the smoke filling my lungs like it should.
Opposite the filter the miniature orb of fire doesn’t swell.
When I suck in, it disappears…
What’s the word for it?

I intersect Cherry.
A lone manhole silences the rush of melt and run-off, and I look back
For the first time at the distance I’ve come.
I must’ve turned a bend because I don’t recognize anything.
Above me
A streetlight flickers off and then slowly,
Starting at a dim blue it pulses brighter and brighter
Until just as it evolves into an ominous blinding white, it snaps off again and vanishes.

Nothing but the sound of my heartbeat and the sewer stirring
Saturates this subterranean voyage.
I forget if the ooze of water flowing underneath the Earth
Is not the sound of my own blood flooding within me.
I am neither dead nor alive, my remains
Remain this way.

The gargantuan shadow of an old industrial building looms vacant
Off to the side while leftover blizzard drives down the roof and over its brick exterior.
At this point it’s just as much alive as I am.
I listen to it heave for life as I imagine a whale would
Lying along on the shore like a sponge.
From a waterfall a stream flanks the structure
Flowing violently into the Hudson’s bottomless yawn.

I lie down and guess how the moon was made.
Beside me, a silent dehydrated drain echoes my voice back at me.
As an astronaut looks with space all around him; I experience myself
Above this drainage system.
My eyes have adjusted so much so that it’s hard to remember
How everything looks when the sun’s out.
I couldn’t tell you how long I stayed there watching the moon implode
Then explode then implode again in the back of my eyes.

I laugh when I ask myself, if trees could sit? I walk a little further then,
I laugh when I kneel at an irritatingly lazy irrigation channel and insist that it should have its prostate checked, at the sound of it dribbling, drooling leisurely.

The dark road leads up a steep hill and opens wide where
Entwined electric cables keep the sky from crushing me.
I’m so close to the stars that I forget if I’m standing on the moon or a mountain.
Telephone wires pulled tight from pole to pole perform on the heavens
Like a belt about to buckle beneath the pressure of a mans globular gut.
From the forests lip I can see the city mirrored on the river.
I lean against a radio tower to signal home.
No response.
If you asked how I got here I couldn’t tell you.
Another forked serpent tongue snakes out from an alternate direction,
Up from an even darker road than the one I’m on now, and it laps cement
At my feet. I decide against following it.
For all I know this road leads nowhere
That I know of.

I approach an old stonewall pieced together some years ago
It’s the only thing separating me from an empire of deer
Who consume the school soccer field.
Paralyzed at the sight of me.
They watch me ease toward a faint light in the distance.

I again intersect Main and am
Reminded of my dad who would ask why not Teddy?
As I step across a bust of George Washington,
Erected on the bi-centennial of his death.
I laugh at those two hundred years.
Then I laugh at the word erect.

I unintentionally orbited back
And recognize everything.
At the heed of my bottomless thirst I walk with Main
Into the convenient store, fluorescent filled.
I wade alone holding water at the counter. Libations.
A dark man emerges with a white beard so big it shields his chest and speaks
To me with the noblest of eyes. He comes to collect monies made in my image, not his.
His imminent magnificence
Draws laughter when I recognize he’s God.
Behind him, his crude bone white menu hangs, he’s spelled basket with an I,
He would.
I laugh neighborly at his solemn illiteracy,
Yet commend his convenience.

Down Main I observe silence
Before everything’s lost in me.
My menacing laughter trails behind, ether in orbit
And I forget if I’m the audience or the act.
Those that mourn or the corpse.

If you asked, I couldn’t tell you if it were night or day when I decided to return home.