Visiting the coast of the Gulf — it is humid,
this I knew once & have kept, a dull
story I sometimes tell about a lost quarter
of my life. You know how the past, like a train
through town mid-afternoon, misguided
despite its tracks, stops traffic, shears the undivided

muddle into a neat impasse, each onlooker’s undivided
attention face-forward, for once, squinting & humid
& waiting to be released to motion. I miss, guided
by longing, what’s just ahead, until, dulled
by my own lazy wit, I train
my eyes on the hands I’ve quartered

Before me. They are not my own. I’ve given time no quarter,
but it has settled here anyway. I am one, divided
in the usual ways, like the last camper waiting for the train,
already feeling the knife of loss & the humid
breath of home, that sleeping bear. Now is often dull—
as Joseph Brodsky said, boring. Misguided

well-intentioned work & talk, misguided
understandings & alliances. Even in the French Quarter,
where good times are said to roll, now is dulled
& choked by memory as a pond by plants, an undivided
green fog that kills the fish. Humid
& breezy, this city looks to the untrained

like any other: shiny, peopled, crumbling, the train
clattering in sloppy time to the stories we, misguided,
keep on telling. We stand by what we were. Only human,
I tell myself. Like an old-time traitor drawn & quartered,
I destroy myself, past & present divided
until I see you, out of time & place, my tongue dull

& laden, as if before my gift of bones, the idol
had roared my name. So long ago, you left by train
& I remained in that town, my grief undivided,
pure. Then dimming, then gone. Yet we didn’t miss, guided
by nothing, this rendezvous, here, in the storied quarter
of sin & song. What survives time? A humid

& ill-kept love jumps the train, runs unguided
through humid alleys. But its old quarters,
much-divided, are gone. Loss thrums dull in my throat.