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Some other poems can be found at: Poetry Daily Slate Poetry Society of America Academy of American Poets Ploughshares Virginia Quarterly Review Librarian Verse Daily
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F L A T E A R T H S O C I E T Y Our daughter wedges between us and sleeps far from the world's sheer edges. --- from SplendorP A N T O U M : P O L I S H F A R M H O U S E , 4 A M , 1 9 4 3All night the long whistle and bell barely made out through the rain are nearly unintelligible in the procession of the train. The cars sound through the wind and rain and though we count we lose their number. The endless procession of the train comes over our house like a kind of slumber. We count the cars but lose their number. Too many we tell ourselves yet listen just the same for some kinder slumber to fall upon our house. They've come a distance and though we need sleep we listen for voices the passing cars conjure. They've come a great distance and their sounds endure for they do not stop and their passing conjures something almost intelligible, something we didn't listen for, but endures, like a whistle or the final note of a bell. T H E C O M F O R T S O F M I D D L E A G E -- Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own path, then. – Walden -- One's own dharma, though imperfect, is better than the dharma of another well discharged. – Bhagavad Gita 3:35 Day's last light and stars above this train and the preening, off-key violins of brakes rise in indignation to the strain placed on them at each stop. The floor shakes and the world, nauseating and blurry beyond our windows, coalesces, takes its proper forms. Thoreau, who loved the fury and rough majesty of the train which snorts like thunder shaking the earth with its feet, the flurry of silver and golden wreaths from the gushed retorts of its furnace, said trains set the nation's clocks, and we live, he added, the steadier for it. Steadiness, a longed-for pillow after an awkward day, an awkward life, plumped and cool beneath my head. Steadiness in the walk he took daily by his American pool of good sense and calm, up the rise, across the pike to Concord, past smiths, and school- yard, and shops to a home-cooked meal, wind-tossed wilds behind him. And how should we begrudge him, our deliberate-living naturalist, these few small comforts who, by evening, trudged back toward his tiny cabin and listened beside the water on the forest's edge, to trains at night, ghostly, and insistent, approach from somewhere far away, leave for somewhere far away, engineer listing through a window to eye the tracks that weave themselves across his Massachusetts hills, counting the stops until his head, if briefly, will lean, as to a loved one, on a pillow. |
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