The View Out the Window Would Make an Interesting Photograph

On weekdays I take the yellow-line train

past river-shore groves of trees,

an exposed nerve of nature;

as the cityscape opens and narrows

I look for things I haven't seen before

- I wonder, sometimes, if this is

an act of creation: ultimately

I see only nerve-impulses,

not light.

I don't know how to separate

the internal elements, the scale of them;

is a leaf a tree? Is asphalt

separate from asphalt? On the page

you can see where one word ends

and the next begins, it is the

ideas, smoke-like, that mingle:

Sometimes I am human.

The larger world has an external,

I alone have an inside. But sometimes,

chattering along over the water

like demigods, I am something

less, and the world is all one thing;

reality is the light through film

in a projector, each frame

a perfect universe where

everything is as important

as every other thing.

          (completed 5/2/16)