BUSRIDE We are rolling. Snow and stubble fields all around, vision bleaker than I can tell. There is no horizon, only leakage towards heaven of vapors the earth becomes. I haven't traveled this way in years, not since I was broke and twenty, but this kind of riding stays the same and I can feel myself slipping towards fourteen years ago each time the blackbirds step up from corn rows into air. Pinions clatter, cold pinches skin delicate as grass. They carry their hunger with them in flight . . . Your face had the same oval my lips make closing towards a vowel. Its shape goes everywhere with me thin as paper.