Michael Klein

We were joined that summer

in the dark

in the street of danger

and leisure against the bicycles

and the summer people — two of us loose

from that crowd back there, finding a place

in public to be alone and talking. But for me, more than

talking because I wanted you in body

and couldn't figure out how to push language through the desire

of that. I just stood still, sunburned and shuddered —

young to love, absent minded about it.

Soon, at our feet, something so strange

started moving — shooting past us, very low.

Something invisible — a tube of bent air? that we couldn't have seen it

but did see it in all its being dark and somehow see-through

that it made the street look rippled and ominous

and you said, "something dark just happened, did you see it?"

And of course, I did see it and in the years that have gone through summer

I keep seeing it in different places, with different people who wouldn't

understand what force it was they were looking at — what we first saw —

that summer in the dark when it was bigger than us both

and seemed to have to start through

us first to get to where it was going — and then, mercifully, be all of what

       it was —

there, down the road a little, where it met the world.

What I'm Going to Do Is