Between a day of work and a night which will be filled with work, I pass through the valley in which

the sun, aslant through the cypresses, is cooling its fingers in the river, and every hill has become more vivid in its own long shadows.

I take these minutes with their sudden arc of geese flying across the highway as a sacrament for the heart to be.

It's morning.

Heart lands again in a rainy airport, and waits for its attendant, the body, to show up on the baggage carousel riding on a crate of wine. It then wanders out, cuff-wet, hails a taxi with a wave of its hand, and joins the runnels of cars radiating inwards to a frenetic city looming across a river.

There it will say silent for days, a stranger to others, to itself. Will perfect the dumb art of gesture.

A gaze held too long across a cafe window that could mean anything: "your naked hunger bothers me"; "I am glad atleast you, the stranger, have noticed the curve of my neck and shoulders in this summer green dress"; "I am as lonely as you are in this country of speech".

Its cold hands will warm themselves over eyelets of huge sunflowers, fingers saying to it "this is bread of hot summer air. This is all that you are allowed to touch now. Forget the nights when the mouth cleaved through the faint rivulets of hair on her body, feasting. Forget all these hungers, only one of which is your own. This one: to speak, and be spoken to."

I came to know about you only in the passing, a stray, days-old newspaper picked up on the F train. It simply said you jumped, you suicided. No picture or a life story (other than your last job: security guard) to go with description of the jump (a leap of eight floors, three or four seconds of air)

What this city grants us is anonymity and loneliness, even in dying, as it does in these subway window-reflected lives: a woman reading stories to her daughter, another woman reading a pocket bible, a busker with his guitar sleeping off his wailing through the rush hour press of swamp heat, a young couple, obviously in that green flush of love, whispering, unaware how soon there might be nothing left to say to each other.

So I bless you brother, and give you these words, these drowsy bodies in motion, this hour of quite Brooklyn summer you will not be able to feel under your consumed skin, with the hope someone else will be here, to say a kaddish for me when I jump.