Amtrak train arriving at Hudson Amtrak Station Photo by Howie Lisnoff
Leave-taking
Left beside the road across from the Yale playing fields. My parents circled the diner’s parking lot. Decades later beside the Hudson River, I mark comings and goings by that yardstick of abandonment that left me bereft. My hair stylist says “Get over it!” But the losses mount. Here at the Amtrak station great billowing white and gray masses of cumulus atop the Catskills also mark the transient quality of all these places of departures and reunions, love and grief, longing, and abandonment, too. It is Ecclesiastes emptying in endless cycles. The mourners have stood lately twice at the nearby cemetery. They are well dressed for the final parting. It is all loss. Part of me remains in the parking lot across from the Yale playing fields forever bereft. This is also told silently in the taillights of departing trains.
Leave-Taking