The Apostrophe Blog
I have taken many trains across these United States. Generally sleeper cars were involved. Many of these trains have romantic-sounding names—the Coast Starlight, the Empire Builder, the Capitol Limited, the California Zephyr, and the Texas Eagle to cite but a few. My travelogue/narrative poem about one of these train adventures, “Six Degrees,” was initially published in Glasschord Magazine, Issue #9, The Conformist Issue in Fall 2011. Unfortunately, that journal has since ceased publication. On this particularly journey, I was headed to a writing weekend at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California via Salinas and a trusty rental car.
“Six Degrees” was recently re-published online in Fall 2024 at Poemeleon: A Literary Journal. Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry was founded by Cati Porter in December of 2005. Each issue is devoted to a specific kind of poetry. The first issue, dedicated to the poetry of place, launched in June 2006, with subsequent issues dedicated to different kinds of poetry. To read past issues, click on “read the issues”, which will take you back to their legacy site, or use the bottom or side navigation to view issues on the post-2019 website.
Six Degrees
I was on the Coast Starlight, the end point Salinas,
then a rental and the highway, 101,
that unwind
of ribbon
all the way,
Monterey to Big Sur.
But first, the territories & my pop-bead ears
as the train climbed off the grid
through the Cascades
& into the Dunsmuir dark.
Violins over the PA were evening’s vespers, Mozart keeping score,
& the cough down the hall might have been anything:
the predictable wheeze from a pack-a-day,
asthma,
my coal miner grandfather spitting up lung.
By morning, the train closed on Oakland, a station named for a writer.
But first we had to wait—
for freight to cross a fret,
rail bridge above the tidal flats,
brackish water,
a mothballed fleet in the estuary at Sasson Bay.
I watched
& wished the hard,
sad stone
that is the bottom of my heart would float up & out,
mingle with the eucalyptus tang, its grey & silver
peeling everywhere along this siding, turn California
la-la & light.
Instead, faded
American flags tied with
faded yellow ribbons
spiraled a street lamp in Martinez.
We passed people
fishing in the shallows,
tents a skyline above rubble,
a great blue heron flapping, its neck pulled in.
On through the C & H sugar refinery at the born-again Crockett station.
Bake sales were surely held to pay for its newly-gilt sign!
Berkeley’s Xanadu was a chalkboard—“Whitey Repent”—
& West Oakland boasted a monument to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
We barreled toward the San Andreas Fault.
Then slowed.
A ten-mile per hour crawl, the conductor told us,
because
a man was sitting on the tracks,
refused to get off.
Maybe his head was a nuclear reactor.
Maybe he played the ukelele in his high school band.
Maybe he wished to be hanging instead—there’s comfort in crowds—
with the dozen chambray shirts like scarecrows on a fence
behind one more corrugated, windowless shack.
The others in the sleeper car crowded their panes,
rubbernecking, righteous it isn’t us.
I was already absent,
my naked body flying like a Chagall bride
through the parlor car—
forget about switchbacks
& real time,
right into
a Roman bath cantilevered over the Pacific.
Where Ursa Major coddles, a velvet bowl above,
& my sturm und drang’s abandoned,
no, more like
dashed,
to the rocks
below.
One evening of soaking
to leach any guilt-by-association from these pores.
And I haven’t even gotten to my next
extraordinary:
thousands of monarch
butterflies
on their way from the inter-mountain region of Utah
to winter along the central coast.
The next day, their pit stop will be to roost
in the photinia outside my room.
How they’ll rise—tutti and con brio, then surround—
no, really, crown—
my lucky,
undeserving
head.
The public domain photograph above is of the Coast Starlight pulling into the station at Oakland, California.
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
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