The Victorian Belief That a Train Ride
Could Cause Instant Insanity

Somewhere in Appalachia, a woman
is telling her oldest son not to strike back
at a fugitive father for having abandoned them.

The standard unit of pain is hers to call whatever
she wants since she wears the bruises like the son
wears Goodwill Levis and a t-shirt saying Tramps

Like Us, Baby, We Were Born to Run. The son isn’t
showcasing what he is, in his father’s cast-off t-shirt,
because Springsteen is the last word in Suffering. He

puts it on, the t-shirt, because what changes the way
we breathe is what we believe—though the Victorians
believed train rides could drive you mad. The riders

were rescuing themselves from the insanity of others
just by boarding. Just now, this one knots his leather-
and-scrap-wood tchotchke crucifix around his neck—

the cross is hollow and carries a powder they say
will kill you. I say what kills you isn’t the drug but
the hopelessness puts it there. Saying that, though,

is like floating on the wind through sainted hillsides
where row-house chimneys are censers distributing
God’s breath as coal smoke. The smoke is bruised

gold. It says how, even if there is no God and all
the days from Then to Now have handed us no
reason to hope, we still have a train to catch.

Inspired by an Atlas Obscura item linking Victorian-era train rides and mental illness.

Homeless Man Reports a Dead Body
by Carrying a Skull into a Florida Publix

—Colin Wolf, Orlando Weekly
 
Imagine him in the act of crossing busy US 1,
a silver shopping cart to slow the murmuration.
See the heat shimmers above the road surface.
See a Maserati swerve. Hear a Bentley brake
hard enough to make the muscles of the heart
speed up. In no time, he is parking the object
on a trash can by a double-door to a Publix.
By the pink-flamingo-themed lottery posters.
Why did he take it? Maybe the eyes called up
long rows of tombstones. His own dear dead
or their histories. One witness says he used it,
the skull, like a hand puppet. One said it stank.
Which is why cruisers pull up and spill a cargo
of sheriffs in their Ray Ban Aviator sunglasses.
Later that day, another part of the neighborhood,
a van is parked in drifts and mangroves bordering
a strip club. Under night-marching moon and stars,
the doorjamb of the van hemorrhages arterial-red,
the factory-painted truth that this rough home
is limbed with death in the best of weather.

Dugout

Felled by a stone axe, and burned hollow,
a ninety-foot pine rides the water reincarnated
as a dugout vaguely redolent of its fiery formation.
Three thousand years since Bronze Age Britons

sat athwart—poled through swamps, rowed lakes.
Registered signs: bird trill, antler, planet, moon,
clouds singed by the sun. They fished the depths, cooked
on deck the thrashing silvers.

From the roots of sound and trunks of words, language
feeds images that buoy our dreams. Awakened we craft
metaphors, from the Greek metaphorá, “transfer, or carry.”
Transoms, lifted from sterns, allow vessels to be sunk

for the winter in a bog as nourishing as poetry. Hidden,
then dug out, similes and metaphors also float, fresh
or fossilized—tongue of flame, or eye of a needle compass-
bound—so similar, the insensible ear does not tell them apart.

At Florida’s Pithlachocco Lake, Seminole for “the place
of long boats,” a folksinger and a teacher lead students
to discover canoes by the dozens. Archaeologists spoon-lift
from mud the shards carbon-dated to five thousand years.

In time, the people of six continents piloted dugout canoes
over oceans—some with outriggers, some with sails.
Like squirrels we cannot remember where the vehicles lie
though they branch and leaf and flower before our eyes.

Family Photograph

A satin patina of light hovers over the sofa leather
where they sit—the grown-up daughter and son, home,

together. He, cross-legged between his sister,
her scarf ornamented by a gold gift bow as corsage,

and Dad, who smiles in a wool shirt, Christmas red,
festooned by a tangle of green curling ribbon as necktie.

The father’s left hand lies snug in a brown leather glove.
The son’s lips close in amused concentration, as,

from one blue sleeve of a Santa Express party sweater
to Dad’s bare hand, he extends the four-fingered cardboard insert.

The easy grip and shake say humor’s an art between them.
In the photo we can’t see what’s done: a breakfast of pancakes

with berries and syrup, cups of coffee, espresso black.
Nor can we hear the daughter’s grin blossom into the next quip,

or the silver ornament from Lazarus, now Macy’s—a falling
portamento followed by the stutter-chirp of a mechanical mockingbird.

The same gurgle-spurts their parents had made with forefinger
tommy-guns blazing at Nazis from perches in neighborhood tree forts.

Behind Dad, a photograph of two girls. Sad little Pearl, grandma
of the siblings on the sofa, has cut her own bangs. Younger sister

stormy-eyed Nevada is tethered to sissie’s arm. They’re in button shoes,
twin shapeless dresses of mattress ticking. Pockets quiet their fists

where they stand on a porch in a southern Ohio flooded by rivers
of misfortune years before the Great Depression—a photo in grayscale.

Nothing much to suggest sentinel evergreens on a hillside of snow and stone
where the living stoop to lay flowers, and the grace note of light moves on.

I Believe I’m Sinking Down

from Cross Road Blues, now known as Crossroads
—Robert Johnson

At the horizon a drowning sun,
powerless to float the graphite sea,
casts rays like grappling hooks into her chest.

Onboard, hundreds of screens flicker.
Should she watch Big Fish

or reel out her misgivings? Stage them:
wings unhinged, the fuselage and tail
thundering into an ocean too shattered to reflect?

Storms and wind shear terrify,
but she doesn’t pray the airbus through

a sky star-stung, scythe-hung. Clapton
shreds the blues of Robert Johnson, an afterworld
of resurrections in a set of loaner earphones.

By its wingless tongue, her pencil articulates
the frictions as she belies a lack of faith in last acts.

The Bright and Unforgettable Scent of the Fruit

At 30, my father drove a Cadillac in all weather.
Seeds spat down onto the wax job of its black hood,
black being his preferred color in cars. And he owned

two Cadillacs, which he forfeited divorcing my mother
and selling Roy’s Shell, his gas station, though she saw
not one Lincoln-headed cent. For a man or woman then—
after the Cuban Missile Crisis, talk of bomb shelters—

the best thing about going broke was you had time.
Time to try and love again. To take a son for a walk.
And he took me on that walk. By a river in Dayton.

He said, Five rivers converge here. And named one
by a botanical gardens of flowers gemmy with rain.
He said, the Great Miami River. And then looked off
in the direction of where the bright and unforgettable

scent of the fruit of one orchard is the definition of loss.
On a bank of the Great Miami that day was a rotted boat.
And someone said every boat, new or old, is looking for

a place to sink. He said something similar, my father,
no fan of boats. Maybe he thought the boat we saw
was as useless as oars to row its gray decrepitude.
My parents were poor kids from eastern Kentucky.

Like any refugee, they had problems. Divorced.
Later, she went to work. In a factory. It was all
she could do. Working like that. But she did it

and survived. Meaning her face shown brighter
than anyone else standing over the shiny hood
of the next car he kept so spotless you could
see yourself in every black inch of it.

“Men, Death, Lies,” oil painting by Linda Holmes, © 2017 Linda Holmes. All rights reserved.

I Am What I Am

I am the money that talks in the bank,
a flaw in the mirror, a check that was blank,
the tip of an iceberg, the liner that sank.

I’m the isle of the blessed and the pirate who’d plunder it,
the veil of the night and the lightning to sunder it,
the boy in the bed and the monster who’s under it.

I’m the sum of a part and the karmic subtraction,
the paralyzed thought and the frenzy of action,
the bile in my throat and a low satisfaction.

I’m the past I have checkered, the devil’s detail,
the promise of love and a check in the mail,
rebellion in heaven, the quest for the grail;

I’m the grave of my death and the air in my head,
the puzzle I question, the answer I dread –
each shadow I’ve thrown, and the life that I’ve led,
the monster below and the boy in the bed.

Illustration by Russ Spitkovsky courtesy of Ed Shacklee.

The Slink

Charming as a flophouse with a bathtub full of adders,
it flouts the laws of science, slickly climbing social ladders
by trickling antisocial thoughts like urinary bladders.

Its tongue’s a snaky shadow. A disruptive syncopation
of moves behind the scenes forecasts its leapfrog ambulation.
Its hunting cry a subtle, slimy, sly insinuation,

it’s scoped us out as birds to pluck, but first it plans to fatten us
on patter slathered lavishly with compliments gelatinous
and up to seven deadly sins to tempt the inner brat in us;

yet larger Egos love a Slink, and never feel alarm
till one has stabbed them in the back while walking arm in arm,
selling Brooklyn bridges while it’s buying them the farm.

The Ankylosaurus

Observe this early turtle, one of myriad
herbivores from the Cretaceous Period,
short on intellectual propensity,
since armor’s not his only form of density,

who doesn’t have a brain, but has a pair,
and isn’t very smart, but doesn’t care;
which seems a way of thinking that illumines,
given how much thinking does for humans.

A Joust of Narwhals

Little longer than its horn,
part cigar, part unicorn,
the narwhal frolics, disinclined
to use a sword to speak its mind.

Men have always found it odd
peace should flourish in a pod,
flummoxed that these placid creatures
won’t employ their martial features,

inciting fights on what their use is
amongst the apes on arctic cruises,
till decks are swarmed with skewered corpuses,
alarming the disarming porpoises.

Illustrations by Russ Spitkovsky courtesy of Ed Shacklee.

Frank Bidart, a three-time Pulitzer Prize poetry finalist from Bakersfield, California, recalls The Grapes of Wrath in a poem about Donald Trump’s America published this week by The New Yorker. James Franco, Bidart’s fellow Californian and Steinbeck aficionado, adapted Bidart’s poem Herbert White for a 2010 film starring Michael Shannon, Franco’s co-star in The Broken Tower, Franco’s Hart Crane bio-pic. Read “Mourning What We Thought We Were” and listen to Frank Bidart recite lines that will resonate with readers of The Grapes of Wrath who share the poet’s anger about the past and his anxiety about the future.

Photo by Bill Ray from the collection of the International Civil Rights Center and Museum.

Childhood’s End

Back then, I followed my mother around
looking for approval and was shortchanged.
What is a life if not learning the difference
between enough and not nearly enough.

I recall that she had a hillbilly-simple rage.
Which, most often, she might aim at herself;
but, sometimes, at anyone nearby. And me.
I learned, later, that she’d been a hired girl

for a bed. Meals. Clearly, she was ashamed.
Still, she was proud of what she had learned.
That you overcome poverty, maybe anything,
by working for what is, always and repeatedly,

less than you need. A bedside table was books:
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell and
scholarly works on the antebellum South. She
was born in Letcher County, Kentucky. After

the War of Northern Aggression, and Slavery.
She read to forget. We’d climb in the Chevy,
drive downtown. Into the city. To the library.
And she’d be patient (then less so) as I chose.

Maybe Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke.
Aliens have landed. Taken over. Have hooves,
horns, a reptilian tail. And attitude. Like my
mother who knew what it takes just to live.