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The Mississippi looks placid tonight. Not yet inked in cascading droplets of twilight, and un-addled by a 6:30AM’s blurry vision, the wide waters below undulate delicately in welcoming expanse. It was not long ago that I went in this manner — the icy cracked current flicked from view by a painter’s stroke as quickly as it had come. The click-clack below and surgical-white bulbs above over-shouted, overshadowed.
But by river and rail, I went.
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And by river and rail, I return.
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Pillows of air held me next, streamed jets miles and miles over the great washbasin to the east. I was far, very far, from the flows + the fluxes I have so long known. A placid river was a memory, then, a sterile window to it a far-flung otherworld. All was noise and movement, hot sand gritting between sandaled toes, bits of warm rice lingering on the fingers. But this was good. All, if unexpected, was good. To see and huff and chew and swallow and marvel and feel, oh viscerally feel, moments cherished so. By new’s and not’s, I pondered. By pavements and gyms, I pounded.
By threadings and rootings, I sprung.
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And by river and rail, I return.
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When this train at last chugs into the station, tired steel sighing against tired steel, the Arctic air of old will have long since siphoned away. It was sipped up, I think, from a chilled glass and long straw, the dregs simmered tenderly over Suns and Moons of time. I stepped onto the platform once, getting my bearings; now I step onto the platform, getting my bearings. No simple semi-colon, no, but four months + one week separate the two: a platform step to bridge 130 days, a leaf back to bridge 100 journal pages; a thousand feelings butter-churned up, melding one wild act of this great play.
By time and pencil, I’ve marked.
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And by river and rail, I return.
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It’s like a river in its own right, I suppose, this long, flowing channel of a narrative. Somewhere upstream lie the shores of a different life. I’d ford back, if I could, to see who and what the current has whisked me from. For it has certainly wound; strained, it has, crashed and broken its predicted path. One that’s not simple to recount. One that’s not easy to process. One that’s left me stari — no, aching at a picture of plump fish over red rice; at sun-drenched snapshots of feet dancing, wooden boats bobbing, hungry mouths circling expectantly — the ensemble frozen to the shutter. I’ve been diverted with a cut // from a full half of where those waters could have flowed. The waters, themselves, may be inaccessible — at least for a while.
But by people and lesson, they never dry.
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And by river and rail, I return.
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The tracks have lengthened, since this poem first made page. Its destination felt out of reach, clear though mine to Minneapolis was. In a way, perhaps it’s still not been found. I’m now heading back the same twisting line, the next iteration soon to come, pondering where these words are meant to land. I think it may, though, be like that old watershed epiphany, sweet and simple as syrup: takeoffs and returns, that together obey a blissful cycling. Each push-pulling the other, each a kind of unpredictable, benefiting from no rubber-stamped boarding pass to an end. As for me, I’m really just laying crosshatches of track, and pushing shimmery bends of shore. But that’s what it’s all about, no? Nature-made or man-made, going forward or heading back or at an eddy, both takeoffs and returns offer ways to know, ways to be.
So by rivers and rails, I’ve gleaned graciously.
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By rivers and rails, I’ve taken much.
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And by rivers and rails, I will ever-return.
Jake Marble 