AFTERGLOW PRINT

Across from the minor league stadium,
buses pull in and out from the depot.
For some passengers, it’s the first or last
time they will see the city of Richmond,
Virginia, a city completed by its losses
as my entire life has been.

Though, perhaps
already rolling eastbound on I-64,
they taste just the meringue of its afterlife
at night, and catch just a glimpse
of the soft glow beyond the PET Dairy
distribution plant, where inside,
whether they know this or not,
men must be
making numbers of milk.

Leaving and returning
are like wedding days, irretrievable.
We remember the event
but almost nothing in particular.
Often these occasions are lost on us
completely, obliterated, covered
in snow. But other times,

                    What’s all that light?

someone wonders, waking
from a drowse or turning
his head into the window.

                    It must be the people
who live in that place.

Darren Morris’ poems have appeared in journals including The American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Hotel Amerika, 32 Poems, and Raritan. A sequence poem is forthcoming in the debut edition of Tongue: A Journal of Writing and Art.