Caleb Cluff wrote:
> I think THAT'S a poem alright... It's just a stunning image. I have a
> 70km (45 mile) drive to work each day, and about halfway here today
> those women walking into the river just hit me...
>
> caleb
>

I don't suppose you have to have been there, but the "composition of
place" doesn't hurt.

Ten years ago the woman I live with now was still living in Columbus,
Ohio, and like a love-crazed madman I drove out (almost 10 hours each
way) from New Jersey several times for long weekends. On that first trip
I had my cat with me: definitely a definition of madness. Crossing the
Ohio River for the first time at Wheeling, I saw signs for Bridgeport
and Martin's Ferry; and on the way back I took the left from Route 70
onto Route 7 North and drove the few miles through Bridgeport--a town
built into a mountainside--up to Martin's Ferry, a ghastly and sad
little place that lay in the shadow of a strip-mined hill on one side
and a yellow warehouse on the West Virginia side of the river. Maybe I
was there all of 20 minutes but in some indefinable way I--in the first
of what would be many crisis moments in the ensuing years--felt a
connection to Wright that became dangerously personal because I came
from the tatty New York "outer borough" equivalent of Martin's Ferry,
and shared with the poet not just a love for the word but also a string
of maladies and bad habits that are almost the property of writers. To
this day I go back to Wright when I need some form of spiritual
refreshment. I had a friend years ago who read Yeats for fun and mental
R&R. I read James Wright.

PASSING THROUGH MARTIN'S FERRY, OHIO
(for James Wright)

Turning left from 7 North, I can start to understand
why Wright went nuts here: years of lunacy, drunks,
the chainsmoked Pall Malls that led at last
to the hospice in the Bronx of my beginnings.
Wherever Wright sleeps now, here before me
are *his* beginnings: this river town,
its view of the Ohio blocked by the chuckholed highway
north from Bridgeport, the yellow warehouse
shadowing the sun.

Low buildings, two and three floors, grim
unforgiving churches, bus-bench advertising for
denture cremes and the latest politician to dream
of escape to the Statehouse in Columbus
and a steady paycheck.
Move inside the narrow canyon formed by
the stripmined hills, see what Wright saw:
shades of the prisonhouse, a Hopper canvas
of flattened storefronts and respectability,
the dreamer's curse and nightmare.

He fled the Valley, dreamed his beginnings wildly
forever after, found at last its praise,
the smell of newborn calf and farmsoil in
the Veronese air, in the sweet drowning juice
of an Italian pear; in laborers shifting a stone
to reveal beauty in remembered darkness. And
came to his end: first teaching at the college I attended
in the Bronx, where we passed each other unknowing,
then in the hospice dying-room where a tearful Christ
witnessed from the wall above the bed.

So I come here, to his beginnings,
to pay a debt with my lesser gift and madness:
thence to return across West Virginia's cusp
and Pennsylvania's vastness,
to the two and three floor houses of the world
where I now live, remembering in their crooked pavements
where my dreams take me each night:
back to the City of my beginnings,
the confluence of a hundred roads
that led me far and lead me back
to find out where my dreams go
when I awake.

KTW/10-15-97, rev. 6/07

--------------------
Ken Wolman rainermaria.typepad.com

There's a lot of wisdom here among the employees,
Some of us have street smarts and some have Ph.Ds.
We're all bored and tired but we've all learned ways to cope
Some of us drink after work, the rest of us smoke dope.
      --Austin Lounge Lizards, "Industrial Strength Tranquilizers"