Closer, it is the birds that bind
the morning together—the birds
and the train’s vagrant whistle
summoning all distances
to itself. A dog barks from streets away
and my heart casts itself past
the tender border her calling makes. As we
are always casting ourselves across edges
and streets, as I once stepped from a curb just when
the icon of the walking figure on the sign began
to pulse, and realized in that second that
I loved you. A street may be named
for a mountain, even if no mountains exist
for miles, just as one tree may
stand in for a season, an entire
impossible summer of your hand
giving ballast to my hip each night in
whatever darkness the city can salvage. Here,
where I am far from you and it is still
day, the day is made of wind
and distant cars, and the way each
of their singings can be mistaken
for the other’s. What wind does:
shakes the remnants of yesterday’s rain
down from the catalpa. Discovers
the spaces between blades of grass, between
a cuff and the wrist it harbors, final place
on the body where skin still equals silk. What
skin does: shivers, when wind
discovers it, or fingers do. Knits over
the harmed place, builds a scar. What
happened here? you asked, first
time, fingering the ragged one stamped
on my calf. What you do: remind me,
cities away, to bring my face close
to a white-flowering tree. To walk
beneath that tree again, at dusk, and see
how it becomes the opposite
of lantern. To pass a yellow-lamped
window and glance inside, at books
lined like supplicants on their shelves.

Kasey Jueds is the author of two collections of poetry, both from the University of Pittsburgh Press: Keeper, which won the 2012 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and The Thicket, forthcoming in fall 2021. Her work can be found in journals including American Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, Narrative, Beloit Poetry Journal, Ninth Letter, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, and Pleiades. She lives in the mountains of New York State with one human, a spotted dog, and many houseplants.