She giggles
at her grey pubic hair
through new glasses
An old film…
the youth’s curly leg hair
vanishes mid-thigh
An ambulance waits…
little girl rides a scooter
in ellipses
Coke bottles
clink in his square basket…
pedaling home
He pressure-washes
into the windstorm…
prancing spray-ghosts
Tuscon
I place four fingers
to my breast beside my heart
Coltrane touches here
In the room, though not
for a long time, the
kettle on to boil.
He dies quietly
the clamor of before, stilled
one ring on his hand.
Putting on Brubeck,
lying back waiting to die
one whole year passes
These socks I have now
should last a good while; only
a handful of holes
Two old men toe-to-toe
Carve a new path,
the voice whispers.
Wander without a destination for eternity.
Change your name, looks, personality, likes and dislikes.
Become someone new and forget.
the voice gets stronger with each passing day;
it builds up and up,
fills my heart and bones like the
beat of a drum rattling the floor.
it sings to my soul with honeyed words
like the moonlight creeping through the window
Never come back to the same place twice,
the voice whispers.
Never be that girl again.
You talk so much of busy trains,
the heat, the harsh florescent light
and how they fall upon the brain.
I would have thought that such a sight
would be a poet’s paradise —
the many varied histories,
the pointless pockets of a life
all written on the identities
of passenger faces. Each look
reveals another form of you
returning the gaze; and each nook
conceals the chance for something new.
But, perhaps, you only perceive
the busy train you want to leave.
In the dream
I had reached the railway station.
Now I run through the hallway
Dodging people and baggage
Beggars sprawled on the floor
Asleep.
Slipping, cutting across long queues where
Travelers stood patiently
Tired, shoulders sloping, eyes vacant
Unmindful of the dust, sweat and the sullen children.
Past the metal detector and the indifferent policemen,
Frantic, I look up and down the platform and then
Speed to the stairway over the rails, to the next platform.
Now I pant, I feel pain in my chest, I gasp.
Down the steps, past the vendors of tea, water and snacks
Past the trolleys with sacks of mail.
While in a train from north to south,
Past the paddy, the groves, the lagoons,
Past where pearls glitter in sun,
Someone I love passed me by.
In a train from south to north,
Past the streams, the ponds, the lakes
On the tracks west to where I sat,
In that train fleeing past,
My son, my uttermost love, passed me by.
In that train that flew past me,
In the blur of faces that swept past me,
One was my son, my uttermost love.
I, in a train running north to south,
My heart in a train running south to north.
Fleeing train, lands rush past
It swings and sways, thunders and clangs.
Gripping on to the hand rails
I swing and sway in time.
Fleeing time, life rushes past
It creaks and cracks, shudders and whines.
Gripping on to the thread of life
I hang along till death.
Death, how swift it’ll be
If I let go off the rails!
Flung, smacked and scattered,
A mangle of flesh and bones.
I am, just pieces of flesh and bones
Sewn up like a ragged doll.
A casual toy for a little while
Of a child, to be thrown away, when bored.
Entire landscape south
from Boston to N.Y.
cruddy, with technological waste, wreckage
as into darkness
moves this train.
An American, what can I do?
Strange flat ponds
still mirrors under still sky
with grey-brown fur protruding
in their midst - must be
the rough beast that lives there.
Can politics
do this? What
can I do, an American?
A general throwing up of hands!
The means of production
I often see flowers from a passing car
That are gone before I can tell what they are.
I want to get out of the train and go back
To see what they were beside the track.
I name all the flowers I am sure they weren’t:
Not fireweed loving where woods have burnt--
Not blue bells gracing a tunnel mouth--
Not lupine living on sand and drouth.
Was something brushed across my mind
That no one on earth will ever find?
Heaven gives its glimpses only to those
Not in position to look too close.
It departed at 8:32pm on 1st October, 1963
from a maternity hospital
in a small town in North Albania,
stopped at a creche to collect some cries,
toys,
ink spilt on shirts and trousers,
a broken pencil.
Other stops included
dull classes with mountains of books,
copies, fights, loves, hates, mistakes,
first kisses, white dust from the chalk,
lost shoes on football pitches.
Then it stopped again
at different workplaces
where the head was not needed at all, just the arms,
because the bosses were the ones
There’s the experience
of being the last one left
on a railway platform.
The desired train wails
away toward a city that
was not expecting you.
You feel a mixture of regret
and satisfaction as you retreat
with your ticket and luggage.
A taxicab takes you
back to the apartment.
You don’t unpack.
You're not going anywhere.
There's the experience of not
going anywhere. There’s a
mental exercise of wondering why
Some valleys you passed through replaced
themselves in memory.
Their mystique deepens like loam.
A glacier of forgetting moved into others.
You never know: should mind’s climate
change, these might be recalled.
You cannot remember entering even
one valley without having felt changed:
Maybe you sensed descent into routine,
or escape into meadowed ease—
or knew involvement with anonymous
mass humanity lay ahead, urban sea.
You entered that one valley—remember?—
by train. A pleading wish to be from that valley
seized you, a wish not be you.
As you gazed on and out, your forehead