Nance Van Winckel

The #86 train, its track, and
the track’s gully down toward the sea, around
the mountain, and the mountain falling
rock by rock over the track, and across
my ancestors’ lifetimes--before the gulls
and the Stark White Sand Ages
which fell away into the Gray Ages,
the Dark Ages. Sea of black
anonymity. Those gulls fall.
The civilized and the unfed, their cry
and feathers falling. First a tremble,
a wink of light, a blur. The slide
of your palms’ warmth across my cool
hipbones. Down. Sea on a Sunday. Coffee
in tiny cups from the subdued life.
Slow gestures of the gulls,
top of the 6th on a radio, and
one man out. Heaps of the new world
around our feet, which we step out of
and fall away from too.