On Track

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after Tom Wayman

The first thing I remember was under the train:
the sweet whiff of creosote, the gap to the platform,
and wheels in that darkness, bigger than me.
My father lifted me over the gap to a step;
I climbed the others. Next I remember alarm
that the sun had hit the rim of the earth and oozed
its gold like a cracking egg where the train was going.
"You can ride your whole life long," Dad said,
"and never reach the sun." Reassured,
I slept in a compartment overhead.

I liked how rows of crops we passed would bow
like tines on a comb you slide your thumb across.
Between the rows were sweat-soaked people, bent.
I peered through gaps where windows should have been
in shacks squeezed close to the tracks or remote in fields.
In winter, steam from bacon and coffee fogged
dark glass in the dining car. I'd rub a spot
to see snow drifts go by and vapor rise
from trucks and bundled workers at crossing gates,
my seat level with their red-flashing eyes.

Allowed to roam, I found my favorite nooks
to read and listen to music with others my age
who liked what I liked. Sometimes at a station
I'll wander out and think what life might be,
but someone with a sign Please Help is there,
and something should be done, I know, but what?
Unsettled after that, I'll climb back on
and soon that golden sun we're riding toward
will set, forever inspiring awe in me.
I'll return to my compartment, reassured.

Image by Susan Rouse.
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Tom Wayman's "Kitchen Poem" from 1977 is a lively immersion in the process of making breakfast that is also an exposition of global inequities. That resonated with a theology book I read this month, Miguel De La Torre's Reading the Bible from the Margins, and I liked the technique -- literal kitchen, metaphorical world. I've written about Wayman's selected poems 1973-1993 here.

I am very pleased that memories from age three in the first stanza are true, both literally and allegorically. - WSS

Limerick for Susan

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From pet care to scripting of mystery,
from pizza to teaching for ministry,
 from paint to pentameter--
 we're outgrowing "amateur."
As partners we'll go down in history.

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The photo-cum-painting (courtesy Android phone) is of Susan Rouse with Brandy the dog and me. Susan's discipline of painting at least one work per week is the inspiration for this blog.

The limerick, written for Susan's birthday, refers to the series of mystery dinner theatre scripts that she helped to plot, our Sunday homemade pizzas, and our co-mentoring of Education for Ministry. - WSS

Live Stream

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Save me, O God...The torrent washes over me. -Psalm 69

At the footbridge,
his dog tugged her leash
and he followed her down the bank to the creek

which she ignored,
nosing the undersides of leaves,
her eyelids closed, a connoisseur.

The canopy opened
to a stream of cloudless blue
above the stream, and to one his phone tapped,

a trickle at first
from the waves, four billion per second --
a smirking official, a pundit's outrage

which he scrolled half aware
of thunder, or the sound of a truck
nearby, some rally at the school behind him,

swelling so
he thought he heard Slay them! and
Wipe them out! and Break their teeth!

splashing his ankles,
and reaching his knees as he turned
too late toward higher ground,

upended and kicking
and gasping for air, and thrashing
the arm not anchored to the dog. The dog!

She shook her tags
and looked back to see, was he ready?
Phone in his pocket, they crossed the bridge.

Image by Susan Rouse.
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I'd already drafted this poem when Psalm 69 popped up in the Prayer Book's reading queue with its torrent of curses. I'm reassured that my darkest feelings are expressed, if not sanctioned, by Scripture.

Likewise, I was surprised by an echo in my poem of the horse who "gives his harness bells a shake / to ask if there is some mistake" from "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," one of the first grown-up poems I ever knew. - WSS

Relay

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Aluminum baton, sprinted
to a teammate's backstretched hand;

a command in code run barefoot
on an ancient battlefield;

on Field Day, an egg on a spoon in the fist
of a meandering sixth grade dreamer

whose team was in the lead before
he dropped the egg in the grass;

or the passing on of genetic code
and my father's name, and joy,

to a boy, the solitary dreamer
they lured from his room down the stairs

to share with his siblings in popcorn and TV,
and lulled by their soft laughter

after all the kids were in bed:
the relay stops with me.

May their memory, in stories and rhymes,
be enough, passing on, to pass on.

Image by Susan Rouse.
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