Across the cobblestone street from the church, there is a small statue of Force set on a short pillar at the entrance to the park. I have always loved bronze statues of muscled men, all those archetypes, cast down in aloof glory to the spaces of this actual world. Force sits on a lion, and a boy rests at his knee. His hair is fixed into curls, his bulk does not move against the winter wind. He rests his left palm on the boy’s bare shoulder. I long, childlike, for that steady hand.

It’s winter, but forget for a minute all this stalled decay. Already the days are lighter, a minute longer every evening, a few heavy things set aside for this: the Sunday morning train to Philadelphia, a friend I haven’t seen in years, a ball of orange wool. I sleep on a couch in the Old City with a cat curled into the crook of my knees.

I’m thinking about seagulls in parking lots, feathers puffed and heads tucked, standing all apart from each other. Slicks of ice unmelted in alleys. Cold rooms with mattresses on the floor, collapsing sofas that serve as beds, or the place where the social worker says stay in the car and the young man joins us there, quiet quiet nodding. He has the darkest circles under his eyes, a cap pulled tight over his ears. My coffee’s stale in the cupholder, but tonight I will come in from the cold to a warm restaurant, a shared bottle of wine. How lucky I am.

On the last night of the year, I’m back in a city, again with the boy. Now drunk in a series of places: rooftop bars under heatlamps, emptyish dance floors. There are brief walks skittering in heels on sidewalks. And there is this boy, standing against a wall with his eyes half-closed. I walk over and touch his jaw. The year ends and we endure six hours into the next. Taxi cab back to the parked car in the suburbs, a return drive into the city when nearly everything is gated shut, a filthy McDonald’s, egg sandwiches unwrapped in bed.

This year will not be easy. I want to stay out late in bars, memories unraveling without nostalgia. I want to fall asleep, exhausted and safe beside him, and wake up on cold mornings with days ahead like promises. There will not be time for all this.

All of October was like this, momentarily beautiful and then lost, all that time at my desk, at my computer, in a lecture hall without windows at all. The fall has been microbiology, all the bacteria that breach your cells, the viruses that drift into your lungs, proteins that lock and unfold and allow the lipid membrane to part. The parasites. The trematodes that pair off in a dark turn of your gut, curl around each other, and mate for life– there with your fluid washing around them and your blood vessels branching in the walls.

And your heartbeat in a chamber somewhere above, speeding up a little as you ascend the stairs and turn toward the bedroom.

I’m still some six miles from the Lincoln Memorial. Here’s the children’s hospital, my old neighborhood, protestors, blocks of office workers walking out into the autumn afternoon. Tourists descending into the hillside of the Vietnam wall. When I get to the end of the emptied-out Reflecting Pool, I’ll stop. I’ll climb the steps to stand beside a stranger and read the second inaugural carved into the wall of the north chamber.

But there are other things. Tuesday morning at the train stop, he parks in the post office lot beside the rails, you check the time, you shoulder your bags. He gets out to say goodbye and says something else instead, just as you’re turning away. You keep going, you’ll be undone by all this otherwise, cross the tracks to the northbound side. The summer’s dissolving into thunderstorms. You’re uncertain your luck will hold.