Waiting

For fifty-three minutes every morning
you imagine you can fly, and weight
is only the beat of your soles and nostalgia
trailing invisible crumbs in your footsteps.

You chase jet streams
as if planes were filled with gold,
but you cannot filter sound,
ignore the spray of laughter or maybe
the memories and something else that aches
harder than the miles under your skin.

One day, you span a gape of liquid glass,
find reflected a girl who ignores you back.
You breathe the silence like
it counterbalances regret.

Sometimes, you think of her still,
a tree branch perched stringless
in her cold hands. Her wind-chapped mouth would be open,
soundless, and together you would stand like boulders,
two shrines of desperate hope,
waiting for the fish to come.