"The Subway Platform" And then the gray concrete of the subway platform, that shore stripped of all premise of softness or repose. I stood there, beneath the city's sequential grids and frameworks, its wrappings and unwrappings like a robe sewn with birds that flew into seasons of light, a robe of gold and then a robe of ash. All around me were briefcases, cell phones, baseball caps, folded umbrellas forlorn and still glistening with rain. Who owned them? Each face possessed a hiddenness. DO NOT STEP ACROSS THE YELLOW LI≠ the Transit Authority had painted this onto the platform's edge beyond which the rails gleamed, treacherous, almost maniacal, yet somehow full of promise. Glittery, icy, undead. Sharp as acid eating through a mask. I counted forward in my mind to the third rail, bristling with current, hissing inside it like a promise or a wish; and the word "forward" as if inside it also, as if there were always a forward, always somewhere else to go: station stops, exits, stairways opening out into the dusty light; turnstiles and signs indicating this street or that.

Appointments. Addresses. Numbers and letters of apartments, and their floors. Where was it, that thing I'd felt inside me, tensed for flight or capture, streaked with the notion of distance and desire? And the people all around me, how many hadn't at some time or another curled up in their beds with the shades drawn, not knowing how to feel the forwardness, or any trace of joy? Wing of sorrow, wing of grief, I could feel it brushing my cheek, gray bird I lived with, always it was so quiet on its tether. Then the train was finally coming, its earthquaky rumblings building through the tunnel, its focused light like a small fury. Soon we would get on, would step into that body whose headlights obliterate the tunnel's dark like chalk scrawling words onto a blackboard. I looked down at the hems of the many dresses all around me, they were so bright! Why hadn't I noticed them before? Reds and oranges and blues, geometrical and floral patterns swirling beneath the browns and grays of raincoats, so numerous, so soft: "threshold," I thought, and "lullaby," disclosure," the train growing louder, the feet moving toward the yellow line, the hems billowing as the train pulled up, how they swayed and furrowed and leapt as if a seamstress had loosed them like laughter from her hands "Circuits" Again the dark begins to meddle with the buildings, first softening then releasing them that they might fold themselves back into concealment, while the silences wander, inexhaustible, diverse, hovering like shame and not like shame, dispersing over neon-shattered streets. But the programmed air is purposeful and sure; it doesn''t wander.

It carries a deliberateness inside it, a brittleness like wooden boxes. In my neighbor''s room, electronic voices soothe him, and bodies made of an uncertain light that pass back and forth through brief episodic disclosures. No microbes live in them, or stenches--only a blue glow. Each night they become their own erasures. The circuits that guide me are smaller than I know. What gaunt liberty this is, this waiting for headlines, the flesh drenched in hearsay, or the distant, lovely algebra of stars, the offer that is good for one week only. Outside, the raw data of the faces pass. Someone is tearing a photograph in thirds.

Someone is laughing. Someone is stockpiling rage, sharp words about to burst into the throat. Where is the soundtrack? Where the poison dress to sting me clean? How quiet chaos is. How tracelessly it enters. From the Hardcover edition.