Any other evening, this hour,
the bypass banking the Tennessee
Would be channeling red stars one way
and white lights seething like the sun
The other. Tonight I’m standing
in the slow lane eastbound,
The asphalt cooling, the air
musty from it, almost sweet,
And I’m not alone, all of us
gathered, and gathering,
Milling, or still rolling down over
the hill to the river, some on
The river in boats, many of us
eating or talking, some,
Like me, glancing at the others
and then away, puzzled,
As though we had thought
to find faces already
Familiar, or kind,
instead of these, strangers
We’re standing among, one of them,
all of us waiting for the lights
Flanking the bridge to go out, for a hush
like fog over the water.
I had been looking forward
to the galaxies unfurling overhead
Singly and overlain with others,
to the barrage of cluster-bombs
Deafening and battering, the flashes
making time itself look splintered—
Though now I see more clearly
afterwards, that lull, the night
Again by streetlight and moonlight,
the tissue-thin ash drifting
And falling around us, like us,
dust with a memory
As long as it falls,
and the deliberate climb
Back up the hillside, most of us
leaning into it, not talking,
Or only lowly, leaning also
to the other.