Days since I had much to say. But there are these windows that ask almost nothing of me and I stare out through them as the sun sets, through twilight, past dark till I find myself staring at my reflection, that bitter ghost. I draw the blinds then, slats clanking together like coins. My own pockets feel empty, endless. There are words I needn’t explain, so why this hunger? Out there somewhere, birds sleep in trees. In here I wake at odd hours, ready to believe in the smallest of voices. (My heart: an indoor cat that craves the hunt, waiting in windows in the quivering dusk. I want to devour familiarity, to revisit the animal smell of your hair in my vigilant dreams.) I envy lovers their vocabulary of skin, try to build myself a ladder out of words. I dream of travel, wake parched. I have too many shoes. And so these nights when I can’t imagine growing old. And all this language: small animals in my mouth. I can live with the taste of what I’ll never say, with the stillness of stalking my own ghost in the window. Hours later, dark birds rise from the damp grass of every lawn.

I. I’ve lost track of the silences. The wind across the harbor still unfurls every flag till it stands out straight, shakes rhinestones out over the water. Dogs still march up and down the street, giddy with salt. Lovers still pause at storefronts, negotiate a meal. My hair still slips free of its restraints and tangles all afternoon, impossible. The maps are basically unchanged since last time, but that little core of silence I slipped into all those years, my heart at harbor and happy, that’s just gone. I don’t know if I’ll come back here. II. For lunch, a desperation cheeseburger. I walk past all the places it wouldn’t feel right to go into in the daylight, or without you. It’s the end of the season and some of us can’t wait, while some keep holding on like sparrows in a stiff wind. It’s inevitable, the letdown and release. Inevitable like bad music on the radio, wrong shortcuts through blind alleys. This blue sky is no mistake and somewhere, surely, there’s a place for me. III. Buses disgorge the same ten tourists over and over. They walk up and down the same street, make the same face at every menu. Please, I pray inside my own head, please let me never be so unsatisfied, so alarming and slow. Let me be a part of my landscape, hipslope, eyebright, moon. If it’s freezing, let me freeze. If it’s over, let me let it go with some kind of sweet regret, some kind of peace. Let me love what there is to love, what’s left shining in the stunning wind.

Days like this can find me near defenseless. Almost anything can break me open like the blocks of ice cracking on the river’s surface, like the singer’s voice when the melody takes that sudden turn. Flakes of snow drifting aimless in the air may as well be drying tears on the face of a girl I might have loved, or didn’t. Or a girl I failed, years ago, the way she stood in a darkening room and watched me, her suitcase open. Even burned-out, boarded-up houses have a language I remember now, and the train that winds into the middle of town, clacking and leaning into the shadows of the wrong side. I’m traveling through towns I’ll never stop in, squinting at snow-route signs, at bars that haven’t opened lately. It strikes me as a mystery, how all these towns follow the same rules, how the human heart continues chugging doggedly down these iron tracks. There’s a reason why the old songs are the right ones, a secret all those crooners knew. I loved you the most when I left you behind, when I crossed the iced-over river on my way out of town. Of course this is a cliché, all of it, and not nearly as romantic as I would have wished it, my hand stretching to touch you on your turning shoulder one more time. The snow intensifies and the sky hardens to iron, uncrackable. There’s a line of people leaving, baggage in their hands, the weight of all they carry rolling on behind them. There’s really no other way to travel, going this direction, no reason to look at any other schedule. The rootlessness of birds on a telephone line, the breeze that lifts the feathers away from their warm bodies. I’ve punched the ticket, packed the last of the bags. I believe in leaving. I want to tell you these things. There’s a bruise on my cheek where you last kissed me. In the distance, on the far side of a field, a flock of starlings rises into fog.