The Park in November

Part rain or part twilight
or it's a car pulling up. Late afternoon
not warm, not too cold.
It's I haven't, I couldn't. But a woman
sits in that car, a man there too,
a shadow coming down not a curse,
just rain. Nothing
to do really. Here in the shelter it's damp
and nothing but benches cut
with a knife: the standard fuck you, and so-
and-so loves Julie or Mike or Chris W, names
scratched inside nervous
little hearts, each a heat sink, stupid
sudden-luck box, a wound
in reverse. I can't tell. Why would anyone
sit in a car like that? She's crying.
Or he could be crying. I see it.
I x-ray dusk. I'm a tragedy-seeking instrument
of—no, not light. Her hands on the wheel,
she's miles from here now. Rain,
the afternoon, those hardly-any-words
between them. Yes, then no. I mean
nothing opens why she
stays up front, why he's climbing
into the back now. Why the car
is a room in a house
neither imagined. Why breath
goes white on a window if certain
things cannot be said.

Copyright © 2006 Marianne Boruch All rights reserved
from The Gettysburg Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission