What I Wondered Today

If I could have climbed into another person’s mind
today the one I would have chosen would have
been whatever generated that clear gaze I saw
in some twelve-year-old boy who hauled his
younger brother – maybe four – into his strong
thin arms – uprooting him from where the toddler
had been tottering on 7:30 a.m. rush hour’s crowded
subway floor – carried him out of the train’s quick-

sliding door and up the stairs to get him safely,
efficaciously back to the street, and on his feet,
where they could amble hand-in-hand to some new chapter
in their unknown story. I wish I’d known what really
lay behind the quiet Monday morning glory of those
sweet and open eyes – seeming to bespeak such
patience, fortitude and grand good-will: as if the point
of anything were only ever cheerfully to pay the bill,

and do the work. I wouldn’t mind investigating what
strange quirk might have engendered that warm
bond between those boys – to sense from inside what
may have been some exquisite if unconscious
panoply of joys – some utterly light unconsidered
happiness – some product of shared life I might today
have understood if I had felt it more precisely from its
inward source – beneath the skin – somewhere

within whatever strange felicitous accommodation –
affectionate soft cultivation – had occurred. Today
I’d like to have discovered – seen and heard
and fathomed – something golden in an entity created
by two people who cared deeply: to whom love was
just as natural as air. Today I wanted to find out
about two people walking for a moment through one life.
I wonder what it possibly could feel like there.


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