Empty Planks

She believes in rain but doesn’t take her raincoat;
leaves her keys on the hall table under the mirror.
She believes in trains and in sitting by the window.
Outside, the buildings click by less often;
she used to believe in the city, and living there.

She believes in the dried grass that grows in the echo of buildings
making the moving land more and more yellow.
It’s easy to believe in rhythm, evenly clacking
past mileage markers and abandoned stations.
If she could open the window, she believes
she would smell smoke and bare moments.

The train is empty.

She believes in empty places, envies
seats relieved of expectations.
She doesn’t believe in the sea or the horizon,
not yet, but that is where she is heading
when the spaces in the rhythm start to expand
like cracks in a glacier and she knows she is close.

A dozen steps from the platform she begins to believe
in salt and wax goddesses and stops believing in trees.
She left her sweater on the train along with her belief
in trains and now she believes in skin.
 
Seventy-five steps from the empty planks she believes in mist,
cold and hard like the surface of a mirror
though she no longer believes in mirrors. She is eager
to believe in these rocks, jagged edges that can’t unlock anything,
leaving belief in those keys, that mirror to other days.

Lesley Kimball won an award for the project Borderlands in the Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program’s “Voice and Vision” public art project. The interactive poetry sculpture is permanently installed at the Portsmouth Public Library. Her poem "Devotional" was featured by the NH Center for the Book, and she was featured in the NH Poet Laureate’s Poet Showcase in 2009. Her poems have appeared in Omphalos, Ink-Filled Page, Café Review, Juicebox, Ballard Street, Foundling Review, and the anthologies The Other Side of Sorrow and the 2010 Poets’ Guide to NH. Lesley lives and writes in Portsmouth, NH, where she emcees a monthly poetry reading.