If I have ever written a poem that could go on forever, it is "Poems at the Station." This poem is about nothing in particular, or everything all at once, and it could be either half its current length or longer than Ulysses. All it requires is a series of random times on the clock -- the poem mentions 6:57 a.m., 10:30 a.m., 1:18 p.m., 4:03 p.m., 7:15 p.m., and 11:59 p.m. -- and some general descriptions of activity that might happen in a train station. Of course, it opens itself up for a sequel. Yes, that last time mentioned is the minute before midnight, but something must still be happening at 12 a.m., even if it's only the janitor mopping the floor.
A few years ago, author Jonathan Gottschall wrote a book called The Storytelling Animal about how humans instinctively view life in terms of narrative. That's how we make sense of the chaos of random occurrences, which are really what fill our lives until we start assigning beginnings, middles, and ends. Things only seem chaotic when we pause to realize how many stories are going on at once. True, most of them don't involve us. Imagine that you're at a train station now, waiting for your departure time. You are probably not doing much of anything; when your memory writes the story of your life, this is a moment that it will edit out. But just now, someone tossed two dollars into a collection cup for a Third World charity. (This image is taken from "Poems at the Station," as are the rest that follow below.) A football game has just reached a crucial moment on the wall-mounted television. A toddler is going out of her way to stomp on every crack on the floor. On the newspaper dispenser, an obituary headline reveals that a person has died. There are magazines on the rack, music playing over private earbuds, a shadow of a white oak outside. Meanwhile, the clock on the wall reminds you what time it is, an update -- or an anxiety -- that we constantly seek throughout the day. You are here to catch your train; that's what this moment means to you. To the emaciated child who will receive whatever food those two dollars can buy, it may mean life itself. Possibly the quarterback on TV feels like his reputation (or future NFL contract) depends on what happens next. The toddler -- why is she stepping on each crack on purpose? In the corner of your eye, as you scan your smartphone, you may have just witnessed the moment when she learned to confront a superstitious fear. The recently deceased, who evidently was famous enough to have his death reported on the front page, might have smiled at the thought of not dying in obscurity. To sit still in a public place is to sit at the intersection of countless narratives in progress. To feel each of those stories -- feel them, rather than simply acknowledge or empathize -- would require an out-of-body experience. There are no out-of-body experiences. Whatever our sensitivity, whatever our awareness, we can never absorb the world through any perspective other than ours. Each of us will never cease to be the lead character in our own life, never cease to live off the blood in our veins and the air in our lungs. As John Horgan wrote in an article for Scientific American, which sports the striking title "How Do I Know I'm Not the Only Conscious Being in the Universe?": Solipsism, technically, is an extreme form of skepticism, at once utterly illogical and irrefutable. It holds that you are the only conscious being in existence. The cosmos sprang into existence when you became sentient, and it will vanish when you die. As crazy as this proposition seems, it rests on a brute fact: each of us is sealed in an impermeable prison cell of subjective awareness. Even our most intimate exchanges might as well be carried out via Zoom. It is impossible to know precisely whether another person feels the atmosphere the same way we do, because we cannot trade our neurons for that person's. What we can do is watch, and rationalize, and try to help when needed. So we smile at the toddler and keep waiting for our train. "Poems at the Station" begins the final section of my book Angels in Seven, which ends with a series of poems about travel: to San Francisco, Iceland, Los Angeles, Cape Cod, Harpers Ferry, Virginia, some unnamed destination on Alaska Airlines. I am a compulsive traveler; my current project is attending all 50 states, of which I've notched 43 so far. I am not sure what I get out of travel, although clearly it's something. Perhaps it's pure adventure, maybe a desire to see the world from new angles. Perhaps it's to speculate about what another person's life might be like, even if I can only live mine. At stations, or airports, I sometimes find myself looking at the people gathered around. What are the odds of our paths coinciding here? We don't know each other, for the most part. Few of us will ever be in the same room again. We are here because all of our stories dictated that we should be in this place at this time; whatever our destinations, this depot or terminal is the jumping-off point to all of them. Certainly, we are not all here on a lark. Last summer, while my wife, daughter and I were awaiting our flight at the Boise Airport, we watched out the window as the coffin of a U.S. soldier was brought off another plane. A group of people -- probably family members among them -- waited outside for a ceremony on the tarmac. For the rest of their lives, this airport would be embedded in memory as a place of ineffable grief. Somewhere on our side of the glass, there must have been at least one child giddily anticipating his or her first flight, a milestone that would forever have the label "Boise" applied to it. Even at a moment of extreme joy or sadness, we can recognize the opposite emotion in others. It may just currently seem impossible for us to feel. Then the clock changes. We all know what it means. We speak the same language enough to know that "station" for me is "station" for you, that each of us can scan the faces in line and affix the same word -- happy, sad, hopeful -- to each of them. We have all experienced the sensations that they do, we think. Maybe it was in that spirit that I started "Poems at the Station" (which appears this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder) with an epigraph from another poet, something that I had never done before. The lines are from Lee Mallory, the most flamboyant Orange County poetry showman in his day and a protege of Charles Bukowski, who once wrote, "there is time and hopefully / a train." In Lee's poem, those lines are the ending. In mine, they're the beginning. As train stations remind us, any moment will suffice for both.
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This is the blog of Michael Miller, a longtime journalist, poet, publisher and teacher. Check here for musings, observations, commentary and assorted bits of gratitude. Archives
March 2024
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