I saw it first as a meteor, streaking low and orange over the parking garage,
and for one clean second I was a boy again—the boy who kept his face tipped up
through whole August evenings, who felt a wish coming the way other kids
felt weather, and spent them fast, and never once on himself.
Then the wing caught light wrong, and the sound arrived a beat behind the sight,
the way thunder always cheats you,
and I understood: not a meteor. A 737, losing its argument with the air.
I felt the disappointment before the horror. That’s the part I don’t tell people.
A boy of sixty-two, cheated of his falling star,
getting a Tuesday evening catastrophe instead.
After that the days went on wearing their little disguises.
The bus driver announced each stop like a liturgy—Main, Travis,
the cemetery gates—and nobody looked up from their phones
even when he added, almost gently, last stop before the abyss,
because the abyss has a stop now, it’s on the 82 line,
and you can transfer to the 9 if you’re headed further in.
A man on the corner sold umbrellas black as old photographs,
and when the wind took them they opened and closed
like mouths rehearsing something. I bought one. It kept the rain off fine.
In the grocery store the tomatoes wept a thin red weep
and the checker rang them up by weight, same as always,
that’ll be four eighteen, and I paid it,
and neither of us mentioned the weeping,
the way you don’t mention a stain that’s already dried into the tablecloth.
I carried the bag home, and by the time I got there
the bottom of it had gone the color of something that used to matter.
I used to think if I saw the wire the puppets moved on
I’d reach up and cut it. That was the whole plan—
find the wire, cut the wire, walk out a free man on the far side of it.
Instead I found the rock. Everyone finds the rock eventually,
the one you set your shoulder to, that rolls back down
the moment you crest the hill, so you go down after it,
not running, just walking, the way a man walks toward something
he has already done ten thousand times and will do ten thousand more.
I have made that walk so often now
I’ve started timing my coffee to it.
I know exactly how long I have before it lands again.
This is the part that should frighten me and doesn’t:
a woman burying her husband’s ashes in a window box
and planting basil over him, and both things thriving,
and the neighbors complimenting her herbs;
a choir of stray dogs outside the ICU at 3 a.m.,
harmonizing, actually harmonizing, on the note the machines make
when a line goes flat, and a nurse stepping out for a smoke
not even glancing at them;
my own hands, some mornings, signing things I don’t remember agreeing to,
in a language I recognize as mine.
None of it rings anymore.
Then last night, late, I walked out past the last streetlight on my block
and there it was, doing nothing extraordinary at all:
the moon, full, unclouded, exactly where the almanac said it would be,
laying its plain light down on the wet grass without a single trick in it.
No wings caught fire. No mouths opened in the umbrellas of the dark.
Just a stone, doing what stones do, a quarter million miles
from anyone’s disappointment—
the old wishing distance, the boy’s whole sky.
I stood there and felt—nothing. Not peace. Not even relief.
I checked my watch, the way you check a watch for a bus you’ve already missed.
And that was all. No wings. No wire. No rock waiting to roll.
Just the moon, unbothered, keeping no count of who walked away from it.