With my poet friend en route
to her reading on Long Island
into the bowels of the renovated
edifice looking nothing like
the original Penn Station with
its 84 soaring Doric columns, its
concourse covered by magnificent
glass domes, an architectural
marvel demolished six decades
ago, more recently slingshot’d
into the 21st century, fresh
glass and steel gleaming

Even as we escalator down
to below-ground tracks with
some of the 600,000 other souls
who daily pass through,
we conjure the long-gone
click-clack, the sway of
shifting cars as we tunnel
from one island to another

Emerge into a gray day
that matches the back ends
of brick buildings grayed with
centuries of time and grime
as we skim nearly soundless
through boneyards of rail refuse
past tall brick rectangles with
people we’ll never know living
shoeboxed inside

Giving way to greenery
and wider streets lined
with houses and sidewalks
and driveways with good-
looking vehicles

Watch the Gap

advises the edge of the train
car as we exit, as we enter
the small village, all of 3.4 square
miles of homey-ness, photogenic
houses, tidy lawns, sidewalks
begging for kids on bikes

not so many miles down
the track but oh, so many
lifelines, so many lifetimes
widening the gap from
then to now, of traveling,
somehow, from there to here