Untitled Document
philosophy poem # 8
there are few
unalloyed pleasures
in this life
one
is feeding
carrots
to a rabbit
© Jacqueline Jackson 2007
The American poet, Ezra Pound, once described the
faces of people in a rail station as petals on a wet black bough. That was
roughly 75 years ago. Here, Barry Goldensohn of New York offers a look at a
contemporary subway station. Not petals, but people all the same.
Subway
The station platform, clean and broad, his stage for push-ups, sit-ups, hamstring stretch, as he laid aside his back pack, from which his necessaries bulged, as he bulged through jeans torn at butt, knee and thigh, in deep palaver with himself — sigh, chatter, groan. Deranged but common. We sat at a careful distance to spy on his performance, beside a woman in her thirties, dressed as in her teens —
this is L.A. — singing to herself. How composed, complete and sane she seemed. A book by the Dalai Lama in her hands, her face where pain and wrong were etched, here becalmed, with faint chirps leaking from the headphones of her walkman. Not talking. Singing, lost in song.
Copyright © 2006 by Barry Goldensohn, whose most
recent book of poetry, with Lorrie Goldensohn, is East Long Pond (Cummington Press,
1998). Reprinted from Salmagundi (Fall, 2006, No. 152), with permission of the author.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation
(www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of
English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Ted Kooser served as the U.S. Poet Laureate from
2004-2006. For more information, go to www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.
This article appears in Aug 23-29, 2007.
