Trains, Writers, A Moving Truck, And One Pissed Off Panda.

I have been out and about quite a bit in the last month. I took my second train escapade to Washington and Philadelphia and found the whole mode of rail travel to be built especially for me. I remember when the Detroit & Mackinac line was still running and I would see those trains come through and think, fairly seriously, about chasing one down and seeing where I would end up. It is likely for the best that I did not act on that impulse because I would have ended up in either Detroit or Mackinac and while both of those places have, relatively speaking, very redeeming qualities they would not have lived up to the romantic notions that I had nurtured.

Rail travel is an excellent catalyst for a romantic. I guessed at the lives of my fellow riders. I imagined the train falling off the tracks in the middle of the Allegheny mountains and into the Allegheny or Monogahela Rivers and floating the rest of the way. I watched trains like those I grew up with pass us by full of cattle, pigs, coal, iron ore, scrap steel, and chemicals I do not even want to guess at. I spoke to a nurse from Baltimore who hated her job and wanted to just stay home and teach her daughter. I spoke to a man who sells skyscrapers to anyone interested in buying one. He was on his way to close a billion dollar sale in Chicago. Apparently that is the general asking price for these imposing monsters of steel and concrete and glass. I watched a domestic dispute over an extremely expensive shooter made of two-parts vodka and one-part gin. This particular drink caused me quite a bit of distress for a while, not from drinking it, but from imagining anyone else drinking it.

Both Union Station in Washington and 30th Street Station in Philadelphia are wonderful pieces of historical architecture. Any of you who know me well can picture the scene: I am standing in the middle of a throng of people staring up at the ceilings of these gorgeous depots trying to figure out the designs and knocking over folks in my own special and clumsy way.

To make a long story short I helped Rachel move her stuff from Philly to DC over the weekend so the initial journey was from South Bend to Washington to Philadelphia to Lederach which is a nice solid twenty-four hours of travel. We spent a full day filling the truck and then had a surprisingly uneventful drive from Lederach back to Washington on I-95. With the help of a half-dozen fine people we were able to unload the truck in one/sixteenth the time it took to fill it. Yay for fine people!!!

Rachel's apartment is in the Mount Pleasant area and just across Rock Creek from the National Zoo which was my commute everyday to the American Writers and Publishers Conference. I saw an elephant playing with a squirrel, a gorilla demolish a pile of snow, and I made a panda angry with my constant questions and comments. Pandas are a bit uppity and do not care to converse all that much. I saw a male lion knock a cub tumbling over some rocks. I watched a tiger watch me and knew I looked delicious. There was much more but instead of telling the stories I would simply suggest that you all get yourselves to a zoo soon and keep your eyes open. Things will happen, as they do, in all kinds of spectacular ways.

Writers are an odd lot. I met some decent people and made some good contacts that I hope to keep working with for a long time. I knocked over Joyce Carol Oates. I heard some lovely poetry and had some strange discussions. I talked to more publishers than I could have even guessed existed. I drank whiskey sours, some good and some bad, in the bar where Langston Hughes used to work and where he passed a couple of his poems to Vachel Lindsay under a glass of wine while serving that cranky Russian. Interestingly I had no idea Hughes had worked there until I got back to South Bend and received a book from the lovely Rachel telling me this bit of literary history. It seems like something that might be shared with writers at a writers conference. I guess not.

I had many excellent walks in Washington with people from many different universities, publishing houses, and by myself, but the best ones were always with Rachel who knows the city well and likes to share her knowledge with me.

All of this said I have been writing, of course, about Washington quite a bit recently. I am thinking of turning it into a one-hundred poem project. Here are the first three. Be well friends.




The washington poems


"epiphanies & epochs"
A moment like that when the sun
Shines as the rain falls

heavy. Or when your mother finds
the porn under the bed

and cannot look you in the face
without laughing

and you know what she is laughing
about because she stole one

and left it on the coffee table next to
a good housekeeping.

There are moments that exist outside of themselves.
Like walking through the national zoo

And watching a one and a half-ton asian elephant
Playing games

With a black phase grey squirrel
And it is easily noticeable

That these two have been friends for
Quite some time.

Your mother would giggle and wink
At this.




“such certainty”
They whitewash the apartments to rid them of their history
But sometimes they forget to patch the holes
And we can see where the wineglass
Hit the wall
After missing the ducking head
During a discussion about healthcare policy
For theoretical people
In maine or texas.

I make up stories about the scratch on the floor
Where a drunken intern for senator so and so
Slid naked on a saddleback chair
All the while trying to not upset the two bottles of malbec
Balanced on the palm of each hand.

The outlet under the bed was broken after both occupants returned from work
With guatemalean fighting cocks under their arms
A strange but not unheard of coincidence
And the birds became indignant
And fought to a feathery death.
The winner dying later in the evening from horrific wounds
Suffered while being cleaned for dinner
The loser expiring after being thrown into the wall
And sticking a spur into
One hundred-twenty volts of pepco.

Did the others discuss cookware?
She was right about what I have said about non-stick surfaces
But I often forget what I say.
No harm done.




"the farmer's kitten and the cooper's hawk"
The police look on
But do nothing
About the man sleeping in a box
On the steps leading to the senate side
Of the capital.
I wonder at their thoughts.
Do they judge or suffer for him?

Likewise there is a cooper’s hawk
In the main reading room of the library of congress.
It is like the one I saw in the barn chasing a tawny kitten
After a third cutting of decepit hay
On a mid-august morning.
It did not seem to want to hurt the tiny thing
Just the chase was enough.

The experts believe this particular raptor
followed a rat or pigeon through an open door.
There is no sign of the vermin.
Experts are known to be wrong.

There is the chance that this hawk saw
A door with shadows
And possibilities within
Like a hopper window
With the curtains blowing into another life unknown
And it just said “fuck it, let us see what we can see.”
And it exercised its rights
Like the guy sleeping in the box.

The police should escort him to the library.
they should let him settle
next to the Gutenberg
that cost as much as a block of rowhouses
in adams-morgan.
it should be his manifest destiny.

Open the doors that I paid for
And let this man
And all the hawks
And rats and pigeons
Tawny kittens and tired farmers
and adams-morgan hipsters
in.

let us all in
and we can see
what we can see
and that should be
just enough.