I take trains from time to time, from California to Michigan, San Diego to San Francisco, stopping between station to breath different air and to have a different state's sun shine on my skin. You go on with the journey, studying the passing terrain from your seat, making note of ordinary things that seem extraordinary if only because you're passing through. You wonder about it all as the towns, the old farm machinery, the faded barn sides and dilapidated factories scoot past your invasive gaze: who lives here? I like this poem because Soto appreciates the wandering and the wondering about people and things in their places. -tb
______________________________­­___

Who Will Know Us?

by Gary Soto

for Jaroslav Seifert

It is cold, bitter as a penny.

I'm on a train, rocking toward the cemetery

To visit the dead who now

Breathe through the grass, through me,

Through relatives who will come

And ask, Where are you?

Cold. The train with its cargo

Of icy coal, the conductor

With his loose buttons like heads of crucified saints,

His mad puncher biting zeros through tickets.

The window that looks onto its slate of old snow.

Cows. The barbed fences throat-deep in white.

Farm houses dark, one wagon

With a shivering horse.

This is my country, white with no words,

House of silence, horse that won't budge

To cast a new shadow. Fence posts

That are the people, spotted cows the machinery

That feed Officials. I have nothing

Good to say. I love Paris

And write, "Long Live Paris!"

I love Athens and write,

"The great book is still in her lap."

Bats have intrigued me,

The pink vein in a lilac.

I've longed to open an umbrella

In an English rain, smoke

And not give myself away,

Drink and call a friend across the room,

Stomp my feet at the smallest joke.

But this is my country.

I walk a lot, sleep.

I eat in my room, read in my room,

And make up women in my head —

Nostalgia, the cigarette lighter from before the war,

Beauty, tears that flow inward to feed its roots.

The train. Red coal of evil.

We are its passengers, the old and young alike.

Who will know us when we breathe through the grass?

First of all, thanks very much, Ted, for pinch-hitting for waltz and Paul Breslin for this week’s Thursday OPP.

Having said that, I must admit I don’t like “Who Will Know Us?” very much. Although I’d heard of Soto, I’d never read anything by him before today. So before I commented on this poem, I read some of his earlier poems that focused more specifically on the Chicano experience. Those earlier poems seem to be less ambitious but more successful than this poem.

By the end of the poem, Soto notes that all of us are on a train, headed for the cemetery, and wonders, “Who will know us when we breathe through the grass?” But before Soto gets to that less-than-inspired conclusion, he wanders through some pretentious musings about “ the conductor / With his loose buttons like heads of crucified saints,” about “my country, white with no words,” how he’d rather be somewhere else “But this is my country,” about how beauty consists of “tears that flow inward to feed its roots.”

Gimme a break! Like you, I often traveled from state to state on a train, looking out the window and thinking about what I saw. If I’d known I could have published my unfinished thoughts and called it poetry, I would have.

(My favorite part of the poem was the dedication. I discovered that Seifert, a Czech poet, won the Nobel Prize in Literature some years ago. But, as the poem says about all of us, “who will know us when we breathe through the grass?”)

Here’s another poem about a guy on a train. I like it better than Soto’s poem. It's a shame Slate's formatting doesn't allow Williams' long lines to remain unbroken --

THE TRAIN by C K Williams

Stalled an hour beside a row of abandoned, graffiti-stricken factories,

the person behind me talking the whole while on his portable phone,

every word irritatingly distinct, impossible to think of anything else,

I feel trapped, look out and see a young hare moving through the sooty scrub;

just as I catch sight of him, he turns with a start to face us, and freezes.

Gleaming, clean, his flesh firm in his fine-grained fur, he’s very endearing;

he reminds me of the smallest children on their way to school in our street,

their slouchy, unself-conscious grace, the urge you feel to share their beauty,

then my mind plays that trick of trying to go back into its wilder part,

to let the creature know my admiration, and have him acknowledge me.

All the while we’re there, I long almost painfully out to him,

as though some mystery inhabited him, some semblance of the sacred,

but if he senses me he disregards me, and when we begin to move

he still waits on the black ballast gravel, ears and whiskers working,

to be sure we’re good and gone before he continues his errand.

The trains hurtles along, towns blur by, the voice behind me hammers on;

it’s stifling here but in the fields the grasses are stiff and white with rime.

Imagine being out there alone, shivers of dread thrilling through you,

those burnished rails before you, around you in a silence, immense, stupendous,

only now beginning to wane, in a lift of wind, the deafening creaking of a bough.

Unfinished thoughts is the point of the poem , and unfinished thoughts, the ones that come in a stream , one after another, with hardly a seam showing between responsive notion to the next, is one of the attractions of train travel . Soto gets this flow rather well, and in someways he offers us a version of John Ashbery might read like if Ashbery weren't so reticent to provide a location , place in his work.

Like Ashbery, there is the thing that passes by at a speed that allows one to recognize it and the context it resides in, there is the start of thought processes that might attempt to abstract from the thing seen, but then there is interruption with the motion, the new thing that passes by the observer's gaze; ideas overlap, bleed into one another, there is an a fascinating language formng from textured details and the emotive qualities one quickly draws from them. It is a kind of music one creates for oneself, the contrasts in things, shapes, forms, the striking differences in the qualifiers one quickly deploys to get the detail right. Unlike Ashbery, though, Soto's poem doesn't abandon us at the station, and he provides a graspable sense of meloncholy under the intoxication of streaming perception; it's not just "who are these people" but also, for the citizens of the places these tracks pass through (or pass through no longer) it's a wondering about who remember them when the last house goes dark and the school no longer teems of a new generation .

I certainly don't mind a poem filled with unfinished thoughts. I'm thinking particularly of Frank O'Hara's lunchtime poems. But O'Hara's unfinished thoughts are snatches of fresh images that add up to a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Soto's unfinished thoughts here, however, seem too self-conscious, seem to be trying too hard to Say Something Significant.

MA

Some of O'Hara's best poems are as self concious as anything ever written, and that's a large part of their charm and peculiar genius. Like Mailer, his self-infatuation is more than compensated for by huge talent and brilliant work.

Poety is a self concious medium , in any case, it's an intense examination of one's responses to what life draws them through; anyway, I don't see Soto as being so self-concious as to weigh down the poem in self-doubting murk. He doesn't once, for example, mention the fact that he's a poet, nor ponder at all poetry's inability to get at the essence of things and situations in themselves. Instead he's like the rest of us in the trenches, lost in thought, engaged with the meaning of things in ways that catch the drift of perfectly arrived ellipsis. It's a well turned work, quite modest in proportion to the issues it flirts with, quite moving as a reminder that beauty, joy, sadness are all things we can experience in a single moment.

Hi, Ted, I had to read this poem, go do other things for a while, and then read it again before committing to an opinion.

The concept of "breathing through the grass" is a little weird to me. I understand from his first mention that he means the dead live on through their families, but it's still an odd turn of phrase. I like better the "loose buttons like heads of crucified saints" (I've seen buttons that have that same limp, crooked-to-the-right look about them) and "mad puncher biting zeros through tickets."

But even the playful language doesn't quite make up for the number of diversions he brings into the poem. We're on a train track! I vote for going straight ahead!

PS - I was fine till I got to bats, lilacs and English rain.

Hello Frayers and frayed -

I love a train trip, mostly because I don't love flying. But Gary Soto is making me reconsider. This poem strikes me as a heap of disconnected language and images, many of which get no traction in my mind.

I note the two references to coal, first as the cargo, then inexplicably as "Red coal of evil". I suppose these could mean that our hero is riding on a coal train in winter, which would explain why he is so cold. But more likely this is a metaphor for the human cargo on the cold universe's train (see, my time on PFray has not been wasted entirely). Fine. But why the "evil" label, and does this condemnation of humanity connect with anything in the rest of the poem?

I have just tasted a penny. It was neither bitter nor cold (and not nearly as intense as aluminum foil). How does this simile work?

Mr. Soto also reaches toward the obvious conclusion to "I have nothing Good to say" after writing about feeding Officials. Fine again, a distaste for bigwigs. But the poem otherwise has nothing to do with politics, and poets do not usually have the option of making their points using mom's adage of saying nothing at all.

I share several others' distaste for the extraneous bats and lilacs. But I similarly find nothing to like about the references to Paris, Athens, and England. I can think of several poets who have recalled Paris a little better than "Long Live Paris!" Try harder please, Mr. Soto. And I reckon the reference to Athens must refer to Athens, Georgia; a bookish kind of town with a whole lot of appealing and very busy laps.

Which brings us to the introspective part of the poem, about nostalgia, lighters, walking, eating and sleeping. I also walk, eat, and sleep; but am not yet deluded to the point that I believe anyone cares whether I do.

Hated it. Needed to vent.

Enjoy the weekend.

But I still think this is a good poem. Cheers.

And without the poem, I likely wouldn't have tasted a penny today. The next time I hear a politician mention change, I will think of how change tastes, and grin when I otherwise might not.

Both of these 'train' poems speak to me of alienation, the Aloneness in man.

I was 15 years old when I was permitted to travel north from Norfolk, Va to Damariscotta, Me, right after Christmas, to visit my true love of the moment, whose dad had retired and taken her away.

I rode a Trailways bus for 24 hours that stopped, it seemed, at every street corner between Norfolk and my destination.

I remember that the scene seemed to go from bleak to bleaker to bleakest as we made our way north and barren ground was soon replaced by slush and mud and then by snow. I remember how it felt like magic when I finally stepped from the bus in Damariscotta to what appeared to be a life-sized Christmas card.

In between, I remember to this day the feeling of frustration, of angst, of depression, gazing out at houses in the night, lights on here and there, occasionally smoke rising from chimneys, and wanting to know what was happening behind the doors, behind the curtains, unable to do so, unable to communicate, Alone.

Were people eating dinner? Praying? Watching television? Were children doing homework? Playing cards? Already asleep? I did not know, I could not know.

There was an 'instant nostalgia' in this young man, a longing for home and the things I knew and was comfortable with.

Is this what Soto is writing of? I think so. In fact, I think both poems capture this.

Ps...The reference to Athens and the book in her lap may be a reference to the goddess for whom the city is named, the Greek city, that is, could it not? She was the goddess of wisdom, after all.

Pss...'breathing through the grass' is much better than how a cancer survivor friend of mine refers to it, although not as funny: becoming a dirt inspector :).

Take care.

Savory Goodness:

And without the poem, I likely wouldn't have tasted a penny today. The next time I hear a politician mention change, I will think of how change tastes, and grin when I otherwise might not.

Obama talked about change and got everyone's attention. Now McCain is trying to get in on the act and pass himself off as an Agent of Change. Whatever you think of that, the topic of change is something folks have an appetite for.

Gee, I like this poem. Me and Gary Soto, we go back. I've read stuff of his before and worried for a minute he might be tempted to become an ethnic spokesmodel or something but this is way beyond that, the best thing by him I've read. He's from my neighborhood, I mean I know the valley, we drove from Calaveras County to visit my dad's mother in San Francisco or my mom's in Mendocino County, where my mom grew up on a ranch.

This poem runs straight and true as the Main Line from Redding to San Bernardino. The deep snow rules out that location. Mr. Soto is not in a jolly mood here, I see. He tells us he's travelling. When he gets where he's going relatives will ask "Where are you these days, Gary?" I can't tell you if that's a regionalism but my folks talk like that. He tells us about the train he's on, the world, then his wish that he could live in this world, his dream of what a world he could live in would be, from glimpses. That world would have a past, and therefore a future. But this is my country, only the present. Then he talks about his life in the world, in this country. Is there a future here for him, for anyone? This is a political poem.

I do not know what the coal is, icy to red. I'm not sure that nostalgia is the cigarette lighter from before the war and that beauty is the tears that flow inward to feed the roots of that nostalgia. I'm glad Gary Soto wrote this poem and I'm glad I read it.

falcon: Mr. Soto is not in a jolly mood here, I see

You can say that again. This poem, on my first read (and each subsequent), reminded me of a close childhood friend. Vietnam was (a big) part of this friend’s experience. When he returned home he imparted this bit of wisdom: “Life is a shit sandwich and everyday God makes you take another bite”; lived his life with that as his mantra.

SG: And without the poem, I likely wouldn't have tasted a penny today.

You really should have your people call my people: Method Poetry Reading; that is so Hollywood. (At first. I thought maybe you misunderstood the poem: SG, that’s bitter as a penny not biter). I thought the “change” comment clever.

Ted, I didn’t give this poem much of a chance. It triggered some bitter and sad memories that thankfully don’t bite anymore. My stuff. Not the poems.

Hi, SG - Can't believe you tasted a penny ... talk about sacrifice for the sake of art!

I'm curious what gives you that in the other poem.