Poem Interlude: Draft

Under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway

"Just once I knew what life was for.
In Boston, quite suddenly, I understood..." Anne Sexton

The BQE is really a dragon.
It's a place under which
sounds grow like mouths
into more important selves.
It's aloneness swallowing
itself. The BQE is the horn
of a ram and its perpetual
bellow. It's where rain
doesn't fall. The BQE is
brainchild of a mad planner,
and a travesty. It's the only
kind of tragedy, a long siren
from Queens to Brooklyn.
And sometimes it just wants
to be a number, and sometimes
the sum of green signs. The BQE
is a-hum. It laughs at your
impatience the way a mountain
laughs without laughing,
just a rumble somewhere
far inside and long ago. "Just
once I knew what life was for,"
she says. But it was not in Boston,
it was beneath this concrete spine.