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?

Dog / Anger, Cattle, and Achilles

            Reading the poem “Dog” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–present) I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like – being a dog – trotting in the streets of New York City.  Would it feel small, and like being a child? Would everything be in black and white, as veterinarians used to believe, or would there be some color as new studies suggest? And would politicians look like hydrants?

            “The dog trots freely in the street

            and sees reality

            and the things he sees

            are bigger than himself

            and the things he sees

            are his reality”

            I have an 11-year-old Maltese, and whenever I walk him I never seize to be amused at how eagerly he smells other dogs’ markings before he makes his own. The urgency he does it with is just like people reading headlines on their electronic devices. I imagine my Maltese is getting his news, and important messages from other dogs through his sense of smell, or maybe even notes-to-self he left previously.

            “The dog trots freely in the street

            and the things he smells

            smell something like himself.”

           

            Ferlinghetti makes a political stab through the dog’s point of view. He points out Congressman Clyde Doyle, a Democrat who was a U.S. Representative from California, and served on McCarthy’s House of Un-American Activities, which was an anti-Communist witch hunt, during the time the poem was written.

            “And he goes past the Romeo Ravioli Factory

            and past Coit’s Tower

            and past Congressman Doyle

            He’s afraid of Coit’s Tower

            but he’s not afraid of Congressman Doyle

            although what he hears is very discouraging

            very depressing

            very absurd”

            Listing Doyle next to Coit’s Tower, a monument that looks like a giant phallus, is funny, especially with the dog being afraid of the giant phallus, but not Doyle, a presumably small phallus. Ferlinghetti served in the Navy during World War II, but became a pacifist after visiting the ruins of Nagasaki after the Atom Bomb was dropped there. His political criticism is shaped by the reality of what he’d seen politics achieve.

            “Congressman Doyle is just another

            fire hydrant

            to him.” 

            Reading the poem “Anger, Cattle, and Achilles” by Gary Snyder (1930–present) I couldn’t help but wonder if some of my friends have thought of me in the same way Snyder talks about his.

            “Two of my best friends quit speaking

            one said his wrath was like that of Achilles.”

            I have two best friends since high school, and I’ve had more than one falling out with each.  I’m currently on good terms and in touch with both. There have always been mutual friends between my best friends and I, and these mutual friends were usually aware of the periods when my best friends and I quit speaking.

            “The three of us had traveled on the desert,

            Awakened to bird song and sunshine under ironwoods

                                    in a wadi south of the border.”  

            Throughout the years my best friends and I, with mutual friends, have had unforgettable experiences.  In high school, we went to night clubs that no longer exist, getting in with fake IDs, and once on Thanksgiving almost got arrested for drinking on the stoop of an East Village building where Madonna is said to have lived when she first came to New York. After high school saw the Pixies live in New York, traveled to Las Vegas, and woke up to college bands singing outside my best friend’s friend’s window for Bacchanalia at Sarah Lawrence.

            Sometimes when my best friends and I had quit speaking, I’d run into our mutual friends and vent my wrath to them. Maybe that’s what all true friendships end up going through, because once the wrath subsides, you learn to forgive yourself and then you forgive the other. As you get older, you realize that friends whom you know and who know you are the most important thing in life.

            “I met the other lately in the far back of a bar

            musicians playing near the window and he

            sweetly told me ‘listen to that music.

            The self we hold so dear will soon be gone.’”