Northeast Regional 170 to Boston
A Poem
1. It is so frivolous to sleep on train rides or car rides, or planes unless you are an infant or fond of stiff necks. Missing it! Look outside! I am sitting in the last car of the train as it hobbles through New York and then Connecticut, and eventually Massachusetts, and with each mile the love of Dunkin Donuts increases ten fold. My no-faced travel companions, curling in their retired ashtray seats, yap like sims in the quiet car, but I don’t mind, imagining they’re doing so in their sleep, and pity through the moss and the houses on stilts. Off through the fog from these train tracks lining the coast, lives and loss. 2. Jane, looking out so sweetly, always reminds me when in New England, Regular coffee means milk and sugar, and I’ve never once ordered regular coffee in my life, but it’s like she knew I drink it black by the way my jeans are double cuffed, and how I always walk in raving about the view from the window seat on the Amtrak. Sitting here now, it’s mostly shops and their parking lots, rusted patio furniture abandoned beneath overpass and people. The people in New Rochelle resemble the ones from Stamford. The ones from Stamford resemble people with patio furniture, and those chairs held people up, held people up like mothers until retiring like grandfathers in front of the tv with ten tall boys of Old Milwaukee. And Connecticut sits just fine with me from all around it, even though I’ve only heard horrids. It’s good to see homes away from your own, tangle with the notion that every sad opinion in and around a place you’ve ever heard is dead wrong, staring out at Stop-n-Shop and smoke stacks tangled in the power lines. But then ahead, the cove is mystifying. Naive, I watch those boats and want that job because the waves are calm here in the fog where the only thing wrong is no dry places to sit. Oh, this mundane keeping me awake. Distinctly gray sky how the clouds become indiscernible, clunking along in a silver railroad relic: Amtrak 170 Northeast Regional headed to Boston, getting off in Providence and I’ve made appointments to watch home videos and build ginger bread houses. It helps, but I don’t need the sun to feel warm.