The gate lowered,
and the afternoon placed one finger
between the pages.

Then the train began turning them.

Each car carried a room I had left,
a face illuminated briefly at a window,
a table where someone once leaned toward me
and spoke as though the hour would never end.

The years came loose from chronology.
They traveled by color and weather,
by the angle of light on a familiar wall,
by voices whose smallest inflections
remain folded somewhere in my body.

The whistle opened the distance.
Steel passed over steel,
and everything I had been
moved before me with such speed
that memory became almost transparent,
the landscape visible through it.

I felt the abundance of having lived:
the reckless green of moss on stone,
the crooked brightness of familiar smiles,
the warm weight of a cat asleep beside me,
evening prayers crumpling into giggles.

The last car slipped beyond the crossing.
The gate lifted,
and the road ahead returned
with its patient invitation.

I drove on beneath an open sky,
the unwritten pages stirring,
already warm beneath my hand.

—Jill Szoo Wilson