THE WHITMAN ISSUE

Gerry LaFemina

POEM FOUND IN THE GRAFFITI ON A FREIGHT TRAIN'S CARS
............for Samantha Byers

Across the Monongahela a freight train pushes southward, pulling
a long load of empty hopper cars toward the mines. So slow
moving, I watch for awhile, light glinting off their painted bodies.

They go down track up into the mountains to be filled with coal
& later I’ll hear a heavier train, northbound
.......................................................headed for steel mills & power plants.

Coal smoke black as an omen. Molten ore white-orange
so the workmen look askance, despite protective visors,

their faces tanned, fissured with sweat canals. They pour steel
for rails & car parts, for girders & bolts.

O how the first transcontinental railroad worked its way like a needle
followed by a thick thread of telegraph cable across the plains;
operators working Morse code for Western Union

sending boys with messages to banks & newspapers.

Did anyone ever send a poem by telegraph--
........................................................and to whom? Imagine
Whitman converted to clicking dots & dashes:
Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much? Stop.
Have you practiced so long to learn to read? Stop.
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? Stop.

Imagine the shock of those men at their desks
interpreting each line. & their normal boredom, waiting in their station offices,
in towns across America--their casual conversations

with conductors & engineers. I think of Sam on that long train to Portland, 1988;
what does she look for, head pressed against the seat back--
swaying fields of crops or occasional shacks, miles of highway parallel.

Sun on it all & on the train’s silver & glass body,
so it’s almost as if she travels in light itself.
.......................................................Then silence for 17 years.

In town here I’ve meditated with waking birdsong
the way I used to meditate walking the tracks behind my Roscommon house
breathing with each railroad tie.
.......................................Or else Alex & I would walk with the rails.
He was four then & already I was preparing for his departure.

Sometimes talking on the phone--that fiberoptic Teseract--I forget
mileage & all its implications.

.......................................Sometimes he’d hear the low whistle nearing
& come from his room, sleep following, calling Train! Train!
He’d run outside, waving to
the engineers in those diesel engines the color of sky, so many of whom would wave
back

or pull the whistle again as if to say: Hello!
........................................................As if to say: Come follow.
As if to say: The Lord advances and yet advances
always the shadow in front....

Gerry LaFemina is the author of several collections of poetry, including the newly released The Window Facing Winter and Graffiti Heart (winner of the 2001 Anthony Piccione Prize from Mammoth Books). A new book, The Parakeets of Brooklyn, received the 2003 Bordighera Prize and is forthcoming in a bilingual edition of English and Italian. Currently, he teaches at Frostburg State University and is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Poetry 30.