Sometimes
lying in bed
past midnight

I remember you
hunched over
clasped hands tilted

to your forehead
tears dropping
fat and heavy

to the poured
concrete
floor.

When my
dorm room neighbor
knocked

late one evening
and told me
you had jumped

from the top floor
of the science building
I thought of

that moment
in the church—
how no one noticed

but me.
                        

You kids may not believe it,
but there was a time when people held
the New York Times in ink-stained hands,
slouched behind its grey expanse at breakfast,
or clutched it tight in quarter folds
on the crowded subway train, elbows tight
against their sides, like ramrod readers.

You may think your phone holds the world
in all its vivid pixelated wonder,
but not long ago we held the universe
in our actual hands—
fluff of dandelion, cool of leather catcher’s mitt,
brittle blue of robin’s egg, 
warmth of lover’s palm.

You may read this now and laugh,
the way we laughed at our own
fathers and grandfathers, their stories
of clattering horse-drawn hacks, mumbly peg
on the way to school, knife flashing
like an airborne minnow, barely missing 
someone’s leg, clunk and quiver, metal in wood.
                        

If you always
work at home

you don’t know
the soft feel of carpet

the musty scent
of books

the evening light
on the mantle

the click 
of the front door

the hum of traffic
outside 

the mad leaping
of the dog

when you get home.