Trying to remember

The warmth seeped out of my winter coat.

The coffee shop was steps behind me.

The sidewalk was concrete.

This is the dead of winter. I extracted those words from my back pocket,

my mind sifting and sorting.

The park came into view as I lifted my eyes.

Brown leaves lay on the grass. When had they fallen?

Sycamores, their branches bare, scraped at the sky,

finger bones without nails, cars might be coffins.

If the street were a river, the sound would be alive.

But tires on asphalt, synthetic, false, but so expected as to be

unnoticed. I tuned it out.

My head tilted back on my neck,

the sky overhead was clear,

the blue fading in honor of dusk.

But a wave approached across the sky from the south in the slowest of motion,

a line – no, that word won’t do.

An edge, a froth, like the ocean after a long journey,

spending it’s last dime on an atmospheric beach.

Gray foam, thinning blue sometimes shining through,

the color of the setting sun tinting the undersides.

They say it’s colder up there. I should look it up.

Perhaps the wave is receding, how would I know?

I have stood on a beach as salt foam touches my bare feet

and returns. I cannot stand up there.

But it’s not like that. My words are not false, but they do not

tell the truth.

The branches are bare, the cold seeps into my coat.

The sidewalk has turned to brick. The earth should be solid,

but no bricklayer would have laid these red bricks so unevenly. And the red color

that I call the bricks does not call to mind the red wool cap on her yellow head

or the blue, also in her cap - blocks back - does not match the sky.

I am taking nearly the shortest line between two points, I am walking on edge here below,

steadily pacing out the seconds.

And in less time than it takes to find the words, a jet has dived into a cloud bank.

Oh, that is not it. Not it at all.

The jet streaked. The streak that I saw was a tail on fire from the sun,

or rather the streaming line of fossil condensation on a straight edge,

a sun-colored crayon marking the past.

The glint of metal has disappeared into an angled wave of cloud, heading for the sun.

But it would surely bend, arc around, come down somewhere. Everything up must come down.

But the streak of light showed again briefly above the not whispering waves of ice crystals,

and behind, the straight line turned wavering and vanished into thin air.

Who makes up this stuff, anyway?

How can anyone breathe in the dead of winter?

I turned at the corner. The sky was a dusky rose-blue and if I had stood there it would have darkened. The thin bony fingers of a distant wave of a thousand branches on the far side of the far street from where headlamps lighted the way down a straight street advancing up - or taillights last gleaming receding under the clear sky. Everything must come down.

The same and different. Lines in a book, paged through too quickly.

I turned again.  And again.

I unlocked my front door and took off my coat.

I turned on the flame and stared as the steam rose upwards from a pot of boiling water.

The spaghetti was straight so long as I held it in my hand.

I think I must have left my scarf at the coffee shop.