I Hear I'm Here

I laid my head down those early nights in Boston, when I was
still not used to how the street lights would seep in and bathe

the ceiling milky blue with an incessant, vigilant light whose
subtle warmth softly burned and blinded through the eyelids.

In those nights I pressed my eyes tight and my ears would
widen to hear that the wind was still while the cars still went

and in those passing wakes, they issued a sound that echoed in
my memory as the gentle crash of waves on shores I left behind.

And as the last trolley gradually trucked and thumped the bumps
and rails of Comm Ave, I could hear how squeals of the wheels

and the squeak of lines could recall in some rare way birds and
crickets I heard on rural evenings with solely stars for company.

With familiar tones and timbres the city could almost compose
a home out of its unacquainted places. But upon returning here,

to the birds, the bugs, and waves, I have found that when those
same sounds echo in me, the cars and trollies rarely come to mind.

Though they meet my ears all the same—whether they come from
here or from there—my soul listens closely and can tell me how
they belong to the one but were merely borrowed by the other.