The Doppler Effect of Leaving

You used to watch the pendulum swing.
Now, edges of planetarium universes are daring
to be encroached upon & the metamorphosis
of upward in winter isn’t important when alone.
Still can’t hear everything even like that even
with all my windows down.
I am circling the city backwards
memorizing train schedules at bloodying dusk,
listening for things hurling to collapse, across me.
Sometimes I stop outside buildings where
I’ve been inside of you & try to forecast
how wet you might get around another
neck of someone else’s wood.
I watch the stupid doves.
Some of them taunt me with pinecones,
love songs, others with death lulls & I can’t
hear so well with doors slamming. Your breeze

rolling left to right, a wrecking ball abandoned.
There are sirens, sure, it comes with going broke,
with forgetting Chicago & all that slush melting.

Not that we weren’t icicles at sunrise, but
it’s just something about sorrow circling.

Something about the sun coming up.

I check my watch & walk wide turns,
swooping like dark flocks do
from seasons that show up
the very same but sharper.
I must have missed you by at least a mile last night.

Found myself in a mess of noise before I lost you
like the path of an ambulance when someone

You love is inside. Maybe I uncrossed my fingers.

There’s something about unannounced leveling

that merits the scouring for a black box.

I should have heard the sky scheming & shit
who can hear anything since you cherrybombed the exit?
The sky is the color of perdition & sometimes

now in the park the barreling of your evening train
gets stuck in my breeze. I’m the aftermath

 of Gare Montparnasse. You are riding home

surely & my feet swing slow like pendulums;

 I try to tell which direction
the sound goes & guess to whom.