Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics Across North America

Utica Station Dep.10:07 a.m. to N.Y. Penn Station

Kimiko Hahn | 99 iv. She began as concubine to Empress T’ai then to his son, Emperor Kai, until he replaced his Empress with her. She ruled China from that moment. After his death and into old age she kept a male harem, concubines and courtier lovers. How do you feel about this? v. nipples the color of garnet vi. You advise, why dull a sharp point? why flatten the crests? why rinse out color? why douse what the gut claims from the heart— vii. the he residing in the she viii. garnet hard as nipples— from The Narrow Road to the Interior Utica Station Dep.10:07 a.m. to N.Y. Penn Station In the cavernous station, the train delayed for over an hour, I have watched a woman tend her newborn. She is tall, ties her hair back, has light dark skin and light, maybe green, eyes. Her baby is lighter; the man who picked up the ticket and kissed them, very black. I have watched her because her baby is so quiet. And I have not heard her voice. 100 | Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century On the train she sits one seat ahead and across the aisle. When the train brakes in Albany, the baby cries ahh! And she replies ahh! And I think, just what I would do, then feel miserable. Was I ever so attentive? Placing one or the other child in the stroller, on the changing table,in a sassy seat,in the sandbox surrounded by plastic starfish and seahorses? Stay. Come back. She cradles the child, a boy by the blue; her rocking, syncopated with the train’s chugging. Rain flecks the gray window. We pass a ditch of one hundred tires. A muddy lot of containers. Trees like sticks. A stray willow. We pass by the buds with such speed it could be late winter. My heart is swollen, large as a newborn. I do not want to return to their infancies. I would merely do the same: want to be in this notebook, not on the carpet covered with dolls. To be at the window waiting for their father, not swinging them in the park. That was my mother—in the sandbox. The farther south, the greener. Is it my imagination—or the proximity to the river? I see a couple on a tiny jetty, holding a pink blanket. My heart is swollen. As if a gland, not a muscle. But I am wrong. There were stories I’d read and reread. Mike Mulligan. The Runaway Bunny. Ping, the Duck. If I read “a big word,” I’d explain as if the explanation were part of the narrative: private, one’s very own; escape, get away. Kimiko Hahn | 101 There were evenings where we ate a picnic dinner on the Columbia lawns while their father worked late. I remember because when a plane roared over us, I’d say plane plane and she would look up to watch it roar away. One of my first tasks was to name things. Then it became her task. One daughter’s then the next. We’d walk from apartment to park—Pizza. Doggie. Car.— naming things—Daisy. Train. Bus. Firetruck. It is so difficult to travel with an infant—the bags of plastic things. One’s own pockets, weighted with keys and change. Maybe a magazine stuck in somewhere. Balancing a cup of coffee with one hand, steering the stroller with the other. The baby struggling to be held. Difficult pleasures. Writing time, remote. I told myself then, I need to slow down—as if picking lice off a child’s head. As if reading a poem—instead of sniffing around for the self on some meridian. Along this train ride down the Hudson, the tracks run so close to the water it is as if the water were the rails. I wonder if there is clay along the river’s edge—just as Barbara and I found clay in the brook behind her house. Or as my daughters dug into the sand for the red clay on Fire Island, our hands afterward, cinnabar-red. Always, Mommy needs to— I need to— I look up from this notebook and see a tiny island with the shell of a castle—what is that? Is that how I’ve been a mother? 102 | Eleven More American Women Poets in...