Poetry – Dawn Potter

And now, our new Poet Laureate, Dawn Potter.  Both of these poems map literal spaces, one by a train ride across the Northeast, and the other by following a brook as it moves through all its channels and seasons. “The Lakeshore Limited” is a long, Whitmanesque poem, mapping a great swath of America, from New England to Chicago. Potter maps varied landscapes she passes through, from urban wastelands to carefully plotted farms. The poem includes a broad view of those changing landscapes, but also the quiet intimacies of overheard conversations, and then something deeply interior as the train rattles through the night and the poet returns several times to thoughts of her grown sons and her great concern for them. This map finds its rhythm and pace in the train. I love the way inner and outer worlds flicker through each other and the way each detail is particular and vivid, the way a “flat-white sky” unrolls like wallpaper. In a poem that hints at the large scale of this country, there is also a fine sense of fragility and the loneliness that a vast landscape can elicit. Also, in this song of America, there is an undercurrent of unease, as the poet says, “I beg my boys take care, take care as we pass smokestacks . . .”

Because Dawn Potter is a multifaceted writer, “Brook” maps an entirely different world. If “Lakeshore” takes us barreling through a broad landscape, “Brook” takes us into a more solitary interior landscape, even as it maps the movement of the water through its channels. This is a poet who knows the land, who can say “Brook and I,” say “We slip and stall, we eddy and duck and clatter,” because she has followed this water into a literal and symbolic interior, and knows the land, and its wildlife, and the violence that is part of it.

Dawn Potter is poet laureate of Maine. The author or editor of ten books of prose and poetry, she has also won a Maine Literary Award for nonfiction and has received grants and fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Writer’s Center, and the Maine Arts Commission. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, the Sewanee Review, the Threepenny Review, and many other journals. She leads poetry programs at Monson Arts and lives in Portland.

—Betsy Sholl, Maine Arts Journal Poetry Editor

 

The Lakeshore Limited

 

Flocked with triangles of gray cloud, a flat-white sky near Utica

unrolls like wallpaper.

 

In the seats in front of me

a happy old pair drink beer and eat pretzels.

 

They are speaking with joy of Cleveland

as the woman behind me murmurs sexily into her phone,

 

and I can’t help but remember

the Hitchcock film I just saw—

 

the one where the wicked uncle tries to shove

his nosy niece out of a moving train.

 

I wonder if my sons have seen it.

I wonder but I may never know.

 

For they are men now,

and I have learned to husband my questions.

 

We pass a stately Rip Van Winkle sort of house,

stony and square and obstinate,

 

and the train wails; it wails more often than it stays silent,

its bleak horn sounding at every crossing, in every town.

 

Soon the sky will vanish entirely.

I am traveling alone, not even a stranger for company,

 

and on the whole I’m happy;

on the whole I’m glad to be

 

a body unto myself,

yet the train’s long tumble west

 

rattles a rhythm of tears, every mile an ache.

All night, between station stops,

 

I wake and doze and twitch around in my cramped nest

until the rocking flings me back to slumber.

 

At Buffalo I sit up and squint at the city.

Without my glasses on, I read its glow as Christmas lights,

 

though the month is May.

A thousand gleams dangle fatly in the darkness,

 

and a fragile sleep blankets the car, our breathing and snoring

somehow delicate and beautiful and rare

 

as the engineer rushes us into deep-night Ohio.

At Cleveland I blink awake again.

 

The happy old pair has vanished

and an Amish family fusses around in their seats:

 

grandparents and a little girl, all three chattering

about their adventure to Chicago.

 

Daybreak, and thin horizontal clouds

shimmer over a flat countryside.

 

The hedgerows are nothing like New England’s thickets;

they are broad coronas of trees, with gaps

 

for the dawn to shine through, and I wonder,

What are you doing, my loves, in your faraway rooms?

 

How does the light fall onto your faces?

And now the train crosses a river,

 

a vast suspension bridge silhouetted against sunrise,

water rippling like pen scribbles,

 

and we are in Toledo.

Breakfast: The Amish family drinks café car coffee

 

and eats Chips Ahoy from a big red package.

We’re tearing through flat Ohio now,

 

a domesticated land,

golden topsoil glittering in bare fields.

 

The farms are so tidy and square, not like at home,

where rough-edged clearings placate the surly hills.

 

Everything here is marked precisely, like graph paper.

I gaze at silos, pig houses, what I assume are grain elevators,

 

and looming in their midst a squat

factory or warehouse, some doom-laden

 

industrial site, I don’t know what.

Oh, my sons.

 

Memory is the long wrestle to hold on or let go.

And meanwhile the train horn wails and wails.

 

Full-on Indiana now: farms, farms, farms; then

towns like shabby movie sets; then farms, farms, farms.

 

A guy behind me is on the phone, coaxing a friend

to work security with him at a junior prom in Elkhart.

 

“Wear comfortable shoes, man,” he advises.

Clouds have thinned, the sun is high.

 

The Amish woman is small-talking

with a knitting woman across the aisle.

 

“I never imagined,”

the Amish woman confides,

 

“that an eclipse would be so awesome.”

Then she asks: “What’s the difference

 

between knitting and crocheting?”

The train grinds through Gary,

 

past black towers of chemicals, and in my thoughts

I beg my boys take care, take care as we pass smokestacks

 

and dangling cranes and acres of rusty trackyards.

Somewhere, a giant lake is hiding. I peer hard

 

but I can’t find it anywhere, and Chicago

rushes toward us, Chicago is beneath our wheels,

 

yellow-brick houses and forsaken lots, a ballpark,

cars and buses and elevated city trains like swollen toys.

 

We swoosh forward into the soot of progress,

we rattle our chains and we are there—

 

my ode still clutching air,

time sweeping beyond, in terrible black and white.

 

 

 

Brook

 

Stone root, silt root,

year pressed into year—

 

I left the brook and now

there is no going back to the brook

except in longing

 

I long to be on my muddy knees

slicing fiddleheads into a steel pail

 

Blackflies torment my ears

 

Blood greets air

 

Two wood ducks flash from ripple to sky

 

*

 

Brook and I—

 

We slip and stall, we eddy and duck and clatter

We fall over ourselves

 

Forget, puzzle, stumble, remember

 

*

 

Come home dirty, come home wet

fists clutching pebbles and weeds

 

Rain spatters every thrush puddle

Trail swells to brook

Brook swells to river

 

Ferns quiver along the tender mudbanks

In the cedar a woodpecker hammers and stops

hammers and stops

 

Laughter spins a twig in the current

 

*

 

Laughter spins from bog, to brook, to pond

hustles Mainstream to Sebasticook, tumbles Kennebec

clatters Merrymeeting, snakes into salt-sour creeks

ratchets among knobs and stony knuckles

hurtles into cove, into bay, into gulf

Crowding and crowing, laughter charges the northern sea

 

*

 

So a longing returns to the height-of-land

 

There is an hour, when light is brief

Then a mink slides from her den and traces

the frozen brook upstream to the bog

 

In the frail crust, hares

leave footprints like angels

Silenced, water scratches a message into wind

 

Call it snow

The message flutters, slowly, slowly

 

A hare is a mink’s beloved

So the message is stained with hearts