by Alex Ward

My apartment was sparse, a single bed, a stark chair and
table, like some existential stage set.
My breath fogged the window at night, with
nothing else to do I’d watch the towers, the city lit,
momentous, thinking that in all those other lit 
rooms there were others alone as me.
In a diner I memorized Rilke elegies as ice in the 
water glasses jingled from the El trundling
overhead, low-ceilinged diner hunkered beneath the
Thorndale station.
Stains of the city and how it always subtly changed,
in every train window grease marks from sleepy heads,
tender moment of a big brother telling his
little brother about the ways of gangs.
I’d lie alone at night, starlit, feeling my own
unreal, ethereal skin.
And there was a jetty nearby that
jutted out into the sloshing lake waters like
a beggar’s hand haplessly thrust out
to catch falling stars and
nearby a transient hotel with a handwritten
sign in the window,
“At night, just knock softly,”
for some bum angel who might come to
take you home to Heaven. 

Alex Rainey Ward is a poet, novelist and songwriter. The first poem he ever wrote was for an Arbor Day contest; he won, and with some other children got to plant a tree by the river. He recently became a grandfather.