This is the terminal-pride local,
              thin utopia for transient souls,
chauffeur for the supine memory.
              Bon soir, steel conductor, bearer
with your spine fed by live wires,
              I’m in you as you guide the night,

except you know nothing of night,
              nothing about time of day or locale
other than that blue idea in a wire
              giving a life to your one-way soul.
I am memorizing how you bear up
              under this routine without memory.

You have a destination, and memory,
              whether diamond day or coal night,
means little; the tracks give bearings
              so there’s no need to study the locals
leaning out of hot windows like souls
              in an upper rung of Dante, high-wired,

or the dancer on the street, high-wired,
              because he is half afraid of memory.
I have hair in front of me, and the soles
              of a man to the side sleeping off night,
stirring to take a swig when the local
              comes to a halt, to help him bear it all.

There’s no dark wood. Trees are bare
              and unholy under the wiry light of cars.
The windows are silent, the locomotion
              full of slight lurches hardly memorable
to anyone familiar with this route at night.
              Confinement with others is so solitary.

But there’s another kind of solitude
              in watching as the drunk is borne off
to a drowsy car or the scarf of night,
              the intricate city in the distance: wireless
circuitry in a laptop with its memory
              plagued by a virus that can’t be located. 

The last stop is memory, as bare
              and black as the entrance of a tunnel.
Wires dangle above like lost souls
              whose limbs keep remembering
where the local took them the nights
              they walked through the double doors.