forty
trees blur in the train window.
make a perfect green sheet
of green shadows between the leaves.
every once in a while a house.
a trace of thinking but not what thought.
it can’t be told what is moving
and what is not.
it can’t be told what is in the houses
and what is not.
but somehow they are connected
before him.
so he cannot say what he is
and nothing can be said about saying.
a thing is making a difference.
this is to say it is and is no longer.
a woman sat somewhere nearby.
he doesn’t know what he is to her.
he cannot say what he is.
maybe he is what he is to her
or maybe he should be.
billboards above a highway
change every so often
and are seen
every so often.
a roar of cars eroding asphalt in small ways.
i-95 banding gray through the landscape.
reparations are too intentional to last.
he thinks he will always be what he is now
and somehow not though, on the same days.
trains quieten as their iterations progress.
technologies evolve so evolution can slow.
memories weaken as he gets older
but interpretations solidify
and somehow not though, on the same days.
and still more houses.
a new england set adrift on older soil.
he tries to read a book but can’t focus.
the words perfect green shadows between the leaves.
between the green shadows backyards are storied.
he gets hungry so he eats and then moves on.
thirty nine
a tree is an edge
testing expansion.
skin goes till it stops.
a threshold is always
air and its breath on
bark hard gnarled and
cold. grass goes too and
again edges fresh the
smell of its reach. a
yard the site of this
move toward one center
and away from another.
the edge is of what is
is embodied boned.
as such what is also
unsheltered and left
open to extension.
a tree does not have
roots it is roots that
go too. threshold means
an opening a
place to be filled
with entrance. places
with things.
a place is what a
thing dreams of. a tree.
a grass. wherewith a
thing undergoes its
edging. a tree. a
grass. extension has
no why except
how it is constant
withdrawal that makes it
so. so full. a yard
has many iterations.
it is of nothing
but itself and length,
expansion is basking.
the application is of this to what follows him.
thirty eight
he interlocks with the patterns of rocks on the shore.
a sight is a thing beheld, a thing beholding, a thing beholden to.
he lifts one (a rock or a sight?) and crabs flee.
shadows change angles from slow erosion.
shale shatters when he drops it.
imparting force on something unaware of force
or uninterested in it
or so it would seem.
he does not feel deposited
only as skin sun-basking
but brought toward salt.
the thickening agent named iodine.
an undulating mass.
he asks if it is his own brine
sheltered in his breath
or if it is uninterested in him
or if it can only seem a certain way.
no matter his age among lessening rocks.
he carries that
familiar flirtation with turning into a rock.
the path to the shore becomes hours ago.
a second that passes lined with cattails.
a particular one he stops to notice (a second or a cattail?)
knowing it would turn into something else entirely
because he stopped.
the shore decorates indifference.
still it is a thing he must notice
in a rock face reflecting light
unaware and disinterested and seeming.
he asks what makes a difference
in water and what measures it.
the memory of iodine makes iodine
and the tide
decides its placement.
the rocks remain
though he won’t
to watch them change
nor the crabs gathering in shadows.
Aiden Garabed Farrell writes in Brooklyn, NY. He grew up on three continents, he is editorial assistant at Futurepoem Books, and his work can be found in Belleville Park Pages.