[New-Poetry] All aboard!

[Skip Fox]

--As I have trod the rumorous midnights, too, 
And past the circuit of the lamp's thin flame
(O Night that bound me to her body bare!)
Have dreamed beyond the print that bound her name.
Trains sounding the long blizzards out--I heard
Wail into distances I knew were hers.

-Hart Crane from  "The River" in _The Bridge_.


A sad chord this morning typing in Crane's lines. The "her" is America. I
lived in Ohio growing up, as Crane did, and have heard the same trains wail
into the same distances, laying at wake in an old farmhouse on a winter
night. Of course not literally the same, since we were separated by 40+
years. But I've heard the same trains and have felt the quiet vibrancy and
possibilities of all that land (this country), sensing an essential
innocence even after two world wars. Not any more. 

The happy chord came when I typed: the river in the bridge.



skip fox

"Can't not milk." Howard Fournet telling me about growing up on a dairy farm
this morning. (Nice bumpersticker?)