I sat there,staring like there were nothing going on, blankly out the gray glass windows of the light rail as I whizzed by, trying to ignore the noise going on behind me going like this, "an' can she even believe dat dis wasn't' what I got from de five fingah discounts, an' I just mess her up, I jus' mess update faze a hahz," and there were quite a few curse words blurted outas I sat staring out the portal careening with the bouncing of the carriage, reflections dissolving in the mirror of the glass cities called Jersey or soon to be built condominiums on our tiny railway.

You'd have thought there'd been a funeral there in that car, the way such staid Wall Street types stood -their faces fixed blankly on the nothingness they hoped to project. They were more obvious by their efforts to look and act as if they didn't hear, see or feel the rigamarole that such vipers of unlit streets and narrow hallways with paintless porches spewed out in our general direction, a kind of "notice me for what I am not going to be" thing happening in that instant.

I was quiet and alone for a second. The second was a century old, lost in the hum of the rail way with its squeaks and squeals as it made its way around the unnatural turns passing giant clockyards and the grand old Hudson river looking in on me and at this snake of a locomotive as it whirred around and around.

There's a kind of peace there amidst the hazy New York skyline. It is somber. It remembers.

As we motored on, the cemetery dust of ages past and immigrants, of poverty and filth, of sweat and hard labor and the masses rose up like a purple mist pointing ever to a past that had been buried beneath the marble walkways of avarice.

How much can be forgotten?

You and I walked paths. We took a ferry through Friday and made our way to that bistro by the sea and I drank a martini. It was icy and cold and it felt good against my lips and even still greener and lovelier as it slipped down my very dry throat. And there were beef tips and calamari and a wistful kind of summer feeling hung around that outdoor piazza and there were couples there and they seemed happy, just that it was warm and July and maybe because they had their blackberries, or cell phones turned into the off position.

It was grand.

The dirt never forgets. The ground, the earth, the soil of our forefathers, and of fathers and mothers we never knewremember. A shaky ground. A shaky town.

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