Haiku Freight Train #2: Maintenance

 

Haiku Freight Train #1: Humility

 

Fourth Annual Haiku Freight Train.

 

Tomorrow I'll begin posting Haiku like a freight train, a new one every few days, boxcar boxcar boxcar, or perhaps the poems are like those spaces between the boxcars, moments that flash before your eyes, works of art, then gone. I don't really know. What I do know is that this is the fourth March that I have photographed a train and decided to pair the images with Haiku. I fear that this is related to some kind of seasonal psychosis, or worse, but I like the trains, and the process forces me to focus on the poems. I hope you find something there too, in the Haiku, the boxcars, or the spaces between.

Sandstone and Cinder Block

 

Somehow the Russians

have become worrisome

again,

as if it is 1982

and I am 10 years old

wearing a haircut

circa 1978.

They've taken up

a mildly threatening position

somewhere off the coast

of Delaware, headed north.

"The first thing

you would see

is a great flash."

I remember, 

as a fifth grader

I stood in our basement 

fearing the worst, 

knowing damn well

Ohio sandstone 

couldn't withstand

a nuclear blast.

Now I am older.

My cinder block basement

appears no safer.

Will I never learn?

Improbable Hope

 

In late fall of every year, when frost threatens,

I place a few plants in a basement window for winter,

in an act of suburban optimism, as if to illustrate

that hope still exists.

Then, in the middle of January, I'll find myself

in an old armchair down there, 

my ornery cat, T-bone, on my lap listening

to Talking Heads records.

As he sleeps on my knees, I look

at those plants struggle to survive

on a day or 2 of partial sunlight per week

and think to myself,

What chance have any of us got?, and maybe 

sing a bit as the cat's ears twitch slightly,

"I wouldn't live there if you paid me."

The last two years,

in these most inhospitable of conditions,

on a cold shelf next to the electrical box,

a primrose inherited from my grandmother

blooms improbable flowers.

Cooper's Hawk Unrelated.

From the corner of my eye,

a cooper's hawk 

flew between the 2nd and 3rd

houses on Eastern Heights

sideways, I mean 

with wings pointed

up and down.

I hesitated for a moment

at the stop sign,

no one there to notice,

but my wife

who was smiling

at something

unrelated.

Five Photographs of Five Notebooks 2014-2016.

 

Photograph One: The aforementioned Notebooks, contents varied.

 

Photograph Two: Unbullshitable. Alex references, "poop everywhere." No context provided. A quote by Jack from the novel Office Girl that reads, "I just can't be around people all the time because it makes me sad to be around them sometimes."

 

Photograph Three: Boston excerpts. The Verb Hotel as olfactory experience. A record of seeing Warhol's Red Disaster at the Museum of Fine Art. A melancholy morning on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

 

Photograph Four: an unfinished poem, The Velocity of Loneliness. "I heard the wood floor/creak at your step/and smiled thinking/you were walking/my way. Then I heard the door/and realized/I was alone.

 

Photograph Five: The page on which the teacher wonders about the security protocol for tear soaked standardized tests, and later has a panic attack brought on, in part, by Willie [sic] Loman.