—after Linda Gregg
Rather than ride alone some nights we grip
the same silver rail, at each stop the voice
a proper Charon. Other times we meet
at the Embankment station where a crooner
plays guitar and sings, backed
by buckets of Gerber daisies and daffodils.
I think I know where I am. I think I know the rule,
the beginning, the middle,
to now. There is a reason we don’t find
each others’ eyes in the light
of the train. Why we study the map
even though we could draw it blind. How dangerous
to believe we ride together, to believe someone
will always go with us. Club girls wobble over brick
in their cheap, stepsister shoes, bare legs
blushing in the cold. There was a rule for this.
Something you were supposed to do
and something you were not supposed
to do. If a god washed up on the black shores
of the Thames, would he be singing?
Part of us knows, instinctively, that any light is myth,
that tunnels are only blackness. That we swim
in pure dark, and to hear song without seeing a face
would make anyone afraid.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 3.
Tara Moyle is a licensed therapist and educator. She received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and has published poems in publications such as Armchair Shotgun, Confluence, Diode, and AGNI. Twice she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in North Jersey with her husband and three rescue cats and is working on an autobiographical novel, The Effects of Icelandic Volcanoes on American Spinsters.
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