Hard Rain

My vision is on fire listening to Dylan’s Hard Rain. I walk 16th again in those early yawnings of dawn. I want to learn those songs and cry while I sing them, yelling them out, up from the sidewalk, until people have to stop. I run to catch my train. I sweat, descending into the ground. As words about clowns shower down, a woman, blind, ascends the escalator. I see worlds in my periphery. Her hair spins orange, swirling around the dying pink skin of her scalp. I hear her tightrope walk between the trees. She seems to not be on the rope, but standing with one foot on the hill. She totters a foot off the ground as cloud shadows crowd passed, trying to knock her off balance. They stream across the grass. I see three men on the other side of the world, in love, smiling over breakfast, tucked in the corner of warmth. These brothers laugh about sex and dying, bringing fists together, acknowledging the noise they make… they distract me, and when I realize it, she’s already fallen out of sight.