F Train—With Two of Us on the Run
I listen to angelic voices—while
she looks at her baby’s photographs
laying on a blanket just a few
weeks old—while
another fixes her ID badge
at the collar and two others talk
quietly—while
half-built skyscrapers slide behind grey
girders, old trestles against dappled
grey clouds in the late spring sky—while
noses dive into magazines and
books and fingers dance on touch screens, eyes
straining for backlit words—while
the conductor crackles with news from
up the line that we can’t hear about
things we can’t see—while
wet napes dry against cool air as hips
rock and jerk to absorb the shocks of
sliding underground—while
one man gets up so the woman with
a cane can sit down and apply her
makeup layer by layer—while
smells of coffee and sweat push against
each other hanging from straps on rails
hanging from the ceiling—while
the dark tunnel moves, its walls broken
by shallow wells filled with words read by
those who care what they say—while
a man wears a salmon buttoned down
shirt folded over his chest like a
kimono—while
headphones and earbuds build parallel
worlds far away from everything here
in the everyday droll—while
a really tall black girl in purple
clutches her diploma as her mom
smiles and sits down—while
strollers and bicycles park against
seats and poles and a backdrop of plaids
checks, stripes, and solids—that
wash the scene and keep it vivid, live,
connected. There’s no race there’s only
a runner.
—Brooklyn, June 2015
Notes and Credits
The opening photograph was taken during a raging snow storm on the F-Train’s Culver Viaduct overlooking Carroll Gardens and Red Hook. The train comes above ground briefly there to cross the Gowanus Canal, then diving back down underground in Park Slope. “Two of Us on the Run” is a song by the group Lucius, which formed and cut its teeth in my neighborhood here, Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. I saw Lucius at the Prospect Park Bandshell this summer and then I bought their CD over iTunes and had it on my phone while I took the subway to work over the last few weeks. Brilliant song, wonderful treatment, makes me wish I had a daughter to play it for, over and over again. And when I listen on the train, I think of all the stories traveling with, on the way somewhere in the city.
truth and rocket science 