On The Metro / Poem of Night

            Reading the poem “On the Metro” by C.K. Williams (1936-2015) I couldn’t help but wonder if the working-class subway riders in New York City get more life experience than the rich who have personal drivers. There is a default intimacy between everyone who rides the train, especially during the rush hour, when it’s so jammed people stand so close to one another they can hear each other breathe. When it’s less crowded and seats are available, there is another kind of intimacy when you sit next to someone: you can peak at what they are reading or watching on their electronic devices.

            “On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me;

            she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her.

            I sit, take out my own book – Cioran, The Temptation to Exist – and notice her glancing up from hers

            To take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she ‘affirms herself physically’”

            Williams uses long and prosaic lines describing a scene on the train, and then offers highbrow commentary on it. He identifies himself as a reader of Emil Cioran, a Romanian philosopher who was known for writing about existentialism with a tint of pessimism, and then Williams quotes Witold Gombrowicz, a Polish playwright who was known for deep psychological analyses in his works.  

            Some find Williams to be verbose and even patronizing, but I don’t see how anything or anyone on the New York subway can be described in just a few words, so the verbosity works. Name dropping can certainly be taken as patronizing, but why would anyone reading philosophy hide it? When I was reading Darwin, Marx, or Freud in the past, I myself have almost flaunted the books when reading on the train. I’m always curious to see what others are reading. Once I got into a brief conversation with a guy who was reading Cheryl Strayed’s Wild because I’d just read it and loved it, and we exchanged a few thoughts about the book’s existential themes.

            “She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn’t pull it away;

            she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive,

            achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged, known.”

            Williams nails what it’s like to have your arms or legs inadvertently touching with another subway rider, and how sometimes neither you nor the other person pulls back. That is the ultimate experience of humanity that I think those who’ve never taken the subway totally miss out on in their lives. If it’s not imposing or inappropriate – which does happen occasionally – sometimes an unintentional touch on the train can be a temporary comfort.

            Reading “Poem of Night” by Galway Kinnell (1927-2014) I couldn’t help but wonder about the last time I lied awake next to a lover asleep, me overwhelmed with the feeling of unity hearing both of our breathing patterns in sync. In the poem, Kinnell watches himself gaze at a lover sleeping next to him.

            “I move my hand over

            slopes, falls, lumps of sight

            Lashes barely able to be touched…

           

            Muffled a little, barely cloaked

            Zygoma, maxillary, turbinate.”

            Kinnell uses anatomical terminology to describe facial features: zygoma is a cheek bone, maxillary is a part of jawbones, and turbinate is a nasal shell. There is a raw honesty these technical words bring to the poem, which is characteristic of Kinnell’s other work.

            “I put my hand

            On the side of your face

            You lean your head a little

            Into my hand -- and so,

            I know you’re a dormouse

            Taken up in winter sleep,

            A lonely stunned weight.”

            The usage of second-person narrative – “You lean your head” – makes the poem even more intimate than it already is. Comparison to a dormouse invokes fragility, and nurture the poet intends. We are most vulnerable when we are asleep, and it takes trust to fall asleep next to someone.

           

            “You lie here now in your physicalness

            This beautiful degree of reality.”

            Those two lines gets me the most. Kinnell states the obvious, but the way he states it echoes a kind of answer to all the great questions of humanity. Why are we here? What if we are here to love?