Oh, OK. Three pieces from years ago, none as
amusing as the Arp, or for that matter Cendrar's
La prose du Transibérien et de la petite Jeanne
de France. Followed by a translation of the Cuban poet Rogelio Nogueras.
AMTRAK, SOUTH FROM BOSTON
Slow train through the wastes,
scrubby fields bordered with junkyards.
.
Berry-bushes, and orange grasses.
A hill with a broadcast tower.
.
An elegant gate,
unhinged,
opening on the track, that must once
have been an entryway.
.
Rusty. Rusty metal.
Rusty grasses.
.
On a pond,
a duck, and its wake.
Nacreous water under sudden clouds.
.
A tumult of clouds toward sundown.
A sky-battle westward.
.
These trees that will die in water.
.
Gray building against a gray sky, but in
the sky at least a glow of light,
a hope of weather. The building
a chicken death-house.
.
And suddenly, the river broadens toward bay-water.
.
The bay. Marshlands, the land,
what there is of it, humbled.
.
Now, quilted cumulus, tremendous and close,
that swallow the day. A dead tree across water
points as if shrieking.
A sky-prophecy.
.
Clouds shifting
against each other,
eating and spewing forth light. The town
a toy beneath them. The ground
could
open, but the sky?
.
Across the aisle a girl waves strangely,
palm erect, fingers straight,
hinged at the knuckles. saying
goodbye. She fights back sorrow,
her mouth and chin wrinkled against tears. That's
why she waves so rigidly: A sense of gallantry that
reminds me of Joan.
.
To read, I turn on the light. I had been reading
by the varying dusk, as if
a part of it. Now
the light isolates.
.
A pair of swans, one
a flat float, its head
lost beneath the glass of the water.
.
All grey now–on the sound
wavelets. At the damp edge
its thin reflection races the train, and the land
and the water and sky
don't swallow anything, but continue
the tension of passage. No stopping. Even
in darkness the sky wheels. And I feel
a kinship here. My friend Mac
finds this troublesome. It troubles
me, too, to have to fight back to it until,
in the lulls of fighting,
it comes of itself. Kinship.
and the train
moves forward and the sun
west and my life
my body
a society of motion.
.
Across the way
I want to tell her she reminds me
of Joan. Protective. She sucks at her collar
and reads, as if curled in bed. We are all
caught in the intimacy of night.
Plunged
into the sudden intimacy of darkness.
AMTRAK, NEW YORK SOUTH
My virtue is movement
which stealeth contemplation.
In the midst of the marshes
ramshackle houses built on landfill
backing on the dump. Gray fleshly ice
melting into reeds and an oily river with bridges scarcely flatter
than the flat marsh and the fog, and suddenly
hills
with trucks great
tumuli
of buried rubbish. In the valleys
rusted grasses, head-high, and telephone poles
isolate, fragile.
Struck by the neatness of tract homes each one on its
measured lot trees
gray, and
darker
than the fog.
Fragments:
a continuous stream of vine,
tree, and the even stubs
of clipped winter hedges
naked and violent at the edge of the forest. Rusty mulch
of summer's leafage. A dirt track becomes two curved
parallel ditches still water.
Now, stubble-fields where corn, and at present the only snow
trapped in tractor-tracks at the edges.
And a field of drowning trees.
Would like
to sink into,
to the ankles, feel the leaves
cling there, cold,
and leathery.
Clearings with corrugated buildings in improbable colors aqua,
turquoise.
A huge factory with a steaming fountain
one story, acres of it,
horizontal.
One wants a generalization.
Cars on a siding, the outskirts of Trenton.
Insistent rain on a greasy puddle
and the cat-like eyes
of a signal-light. The refuse of past
repairs and weedy abandonments.
Turbulent river banks, flooded
trees maples,
drowning., I think, and a hillside
with houses irregularly planted.
Hard to separate water from pavement.
In a factory district an almost-pastoral mural,
a full block long,
fails to obliterate the grime.
An abnormal life
in which the pressures of phenomena
overwhelm continuity.
A gallery of women's faces.
Going nowhere
for a time to come.
The light transfigured by the coming storm.
A flooded roof become a habitat for gulls.
So as if by magic
to lift the veil,
and the bride.
RAILROAD SONG
An island with trees
separates the estuary from the bay.
A glow on the water where sun hits
the east face of a tin shed.
Mills and millhouses. Inauspicious water.
S-curves through marshes.
Hills. Pine-green and brown.
Brown. A few houses.
A junkyard for trailers. A steeple
declares a church. Red paint
that signifies "country"
when applied to a car-barn.
Canny with language, the land
speaks.
Conducting
an orchestra of bulldozers from the mound
he has ordered a lake
to the left, with a hill
behind it, and a broad
flat space to where a line
of trees divides the properties.
On the slope from the marsh
but before the stony copse with its tree-cover
a recent cemetery,
small markers,
short grass,
no shrubs,
no weeds.
In sunlight
desolate, parched.
The old pilings of an earlier bridge.
A town on flat land
naked
to the water.
Those from the marshes
stayed in the marshes. Those from the hills
went inland. Those from the sea,
those tribes
Of great structures
all that's left is ornament.
VOYAGE
The train runs swiftly on rails half-sunk in snow,
in the ink-black night.
Mother Claudia reads to Nekrazov;
Larisa eats an apple while observing nothing
through the steamy glass of the window;
I write what I see, what I hear, what I can:
poketa poketa poketa,
the monotonous song of the rails
on the hard iron path;
poketa poketa poketa,
the train’s anxious whistle
in the heart of the darkness;
poketa poketa poketa,
the smart vixen follows the tracks
of the tiny fleeing rabbit;
poketa poketa poketa,
and Larisa’s tiny teeth
are plunged into the red apple;
poketa poketa poketa,
Mother Claudia’s old eyes
struggle with sleep and fatigue;
poketa poketa poketa;
I try to write what I see,
poketa.
What I hear,
poketa.
What I can,
poketa.
Why does the train rush so fast
to its final stop?
Why does life rush so fast
towards death?
Moscow, Riga, Nov. 1978
