Public Transport & Poetry’s Transportation

Living in any large city most often involves a lot of walking, riding trains and taking buses—or some combination of all three. I used to ride my bike more often than I do now, but the lack of bike lanes in DC make it a very dangerous space to ride the way riding a bike is meant to be—fast downhill and thigh-shaking uphill-- which works in Rock Creek Park, but not in grid plan with diagonal streets and circles where even the most cautious riders and, yes, joggers are being hit by vehicles.

When I moved here for the first time 14 years ago I thought Metro and my own two feet were the only ways to go, but a few years ago, I found the bus. Unlike the only bus system I knew based on one experience on the west coast, turns out vagrants, rodents and criminals aren’t the only people who ride buses-- in fact, most people don suits, school uniforms, tourist fanny packs and plain old jeans. Real people ride the bus in DC and I find myself on one line or another a lot these days. Two weeks ago I found myself having to temper my, well…temper over having to wait an unusually long and unexpected amount of time for any given bus. There really is no schedule and each day is different, which used to frustrate me until I remembered 1998.

In 1998 I studied in Dublin and when I went there, I thought I’d live in Dublin. I did, technically, but the lovely Haberlin family actually lived in a village just outside Dublin called Raheny. Since all of my schooling and interviews were in Dublin the city, I had two ways to get there each day: the DART (an elevated train, which looks and operates much more like a freight train until you reach Dublin, where a few sticks support it’s “elevation”) or the bus. Both ways involved waiting, sometimes 20-30 minutes just to catch a 20-30 minute ride into the city most days, and it was winter, cold and raining. And then one day I bought a small pocketbook of Yeats for 60p (that was maybe 50cents before Ireland boomed and joined Euro currency status). It was a small book, fit in any jacket pocket and as each day went by I fiercely protected each one of its 60 feather thin pages and memorized the book. From then on out, I never considered my time waiting a waste, rather a time to learn the cadence of Yeats.

This is where worlds merge and things change. A few days ago, while anxiously staring down at my watch, and up 14th street in search of the front white grilled teeth and glowing lights of my non-existent bus, I started singing in my head, “Where dips the rocky highland of Sleuth wood in the lake, there lies a leafy island where flapping herons wake, the drowsy water rats…” That is the beginning of The Stolen Child, one of my favorite memorized poems from that small pocketbook of poetry. My days as a commuter and learning to be patient have come back to me:

Yeats is in,

my iPOD is out—

unless I’m working out.

I cannot tote around my old Yeats book, it’s battered and fragile and was actually signed, by Gerry Adams and an MP during a hike up Vinegar Hill in Wexford when I had a chance to interview Adams. Of course it was raining and I was devastated after a heavy droplet landed on the fresh ink forever staining the page, but it’s been preserved well and looking at it today, it’s quite fitting the pen was slightly obscured by rain. If the book was in mint condition today, I would never be able to feel myself in that damp moment where hardy, soggy people hiked up a hill to hear the modern day Irish Nationalist speak.

(Later that month, Adams wrote an expanded version of his Wexford commemoration entitled “Hope and History Rhyme,” published here: http://www.sinnfein.ie/contents/15185)

Today, I bought a thin volume of Yeats, not for my pocket this time, but it’s just about as small and fits perfectly in my green bag. There is something really lovely about coming back to an old friend and not caring about when public transport will arrive. With Yeats, I can go anywhere waiting on the pavement.

Here is an Ireland inspired poem of my own for the day:

Grass Shroud

Archaeology

reconstruction of the past

using physical remains-

a science undertaking

historical preservation of life,

environment and civilisation.


These passageways to the past

are lined with ancient stone

balanced in a precarious mound

of prehistoric ingenuity

decorated in patterns of the earth

and all its rhythms.


Yet none can say

if the incantations of their language

rose and fell like the tide,

or if it moved brisk

as a horsetail flicks a fly.

What did they dream of

while dragging boulders from the Boyne

to construct a domed tomb

on a hill an acre wide?


No one can carbon-date

the human pulse of memory

or soft-brush the pattern

of erstwhile winds.


I came to study this land

by its people of today

to see how conflict of the past

eats lives in radioactive decay,

hoping the roof-box of their presence

will share a winter solstice ray of light,

to solve the unanswered questions

of future archaeologists

revealing our rubble

and red-rosed bordered hem of troubles

in sea-swept agony.


I have felt the enigmatic wind

blow circles in my hair

and seen the pair of wrinkles

ripple across the outer lips

in a riverbed rim

carrying the sorrow

of aged children on its back.


If point of view were a science

and premonition a trade

goosebumps and heartache

would grace the pages of history,

reminding those yet to come

how to feel and live another day.