And I ride and I ride

Out the window of a six-story brick apartment in New London, as the train to Boston passed, someone was shaking out a black sheet. It could have been a thin blanket or a curtain; it rippled and snapped too briskly for a rug. The sky was watered down with cloud. The light had that dulled, drained look that comes from a bright overcast, so grey that no one seems to cast a shadow. There was a blue pickup truck parked in the lot below, the only car on that side of the building.

From my seat on the train, I watched the whole scene—if there was any scene, and not only the details I picked out and put together—turn away as the train gathered speed, as miniature and precise as a tabletop model. The positions were all reversed, but I thought of Theseus who forgot to take down the black sails as he returned from Crete, so that his father Aigeus leapt to his death from the cliffs at Sounion and into the sea that still carries his name. No one jumped from that window. There might not have been anyone in the pickup truck. It was less than fifteen seconds, ten, that I watched. But I imagined the black sheet shaken out was a signal, the recognition-token of a tragedy, and I still want to know what it signified.

. . . and I hung the black sails in the window
so that you would know: if you ever
came home again, I would throw myself out.