Twenty Questions

Who is the you behind the you
you revive every morning and follow out
into sun covered in fog, under white pines

and over bridges crossing cold
flowing streams, rivers of snow melt?
When you board the train willingly

with a letter that begins, I don’t wish
I’d never met you, do those double
negatives negate your shame

and suffering? When you plunge up
the tracks, pass the mountains of your lost
New England shangri-la, your past

and family and dissolution of what mattered
most to you, do you keep your eyes averted
or do you watch the stopped mills

and sullen bricks? When you see
a raccoon on the flat factory roof do you
turn to your seatmate and include them

in the marvel? Or do you stop up
your ears with buds, and how will
those buds flower? Into song,

speech, music without words?
What do you ask yourself as coffee
brews in the back and you smell

pastries in the microwave, the café
car and its offerings, and you remember
Malcolm X worked the cross-country trains?

As did your father’s uncles, and their
father and uncles, and theirs, and on back?
How do you board and sit and watch

and listen, leaving behind the ruined cities
you track through? How do you keep
quiet? How do you see the stilled

cranes, the rusted machinery of childhood
that has yet to be cleared, the human
lives in buses and cars and on foot

passing by still, or waiting at the bus stops,
waiting at the stations of these former
sites of industry and bust, these Camdens

and Amboys, Bridgeports and Holyokes?
Who are you and how do you pass through
and how is it the best you can hope for is

that someone writes I don’t wish I’d never
met you, what have you ever done? What will
you do now? Where and how will you get off,

beside which mill or factory, which storage tank
or coker unit, where will you find the refinery
intended for the soul? The one that burns through

the self? That will finally change this world?