The Northeast Corridor

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations The bar in the commuter station The Title: "The Northeast Corridor" In his book The Art of Attention: A Poet’s Eye(2007), Revell called it “a title taken from newspeak and describing that cindery ganglion of railways between Boston to the north and D.C. to the southern end.” The term is used today by Amtrak. steams like a ruin, its fourth wall open to the crowd and the fluttering timetables. In the farthest corner, the television crackles a torch song torch song A sad or sentimental love song and a beaded gown. She is my favorite singer, dead when I was born. And I have been waiting for hours for a train, exhausted between connections to small cities, awake only in my eyes finding shelter in the fluttering ribbon of shadow around the dead woman singing on the screen. Exhaustion is a last line of defense where time either stops dead or kills you. It teaches you to see what your eyes see without questions, without the politics of living in one city, dying in another. How badly I would like to sleep now in the shadows beside real things or beside things that were real once, like the beaded gown on the television, like the debut of a song in New York in black and white when my parents were there. I feel sometimes my life was used up before I was born. My eyes sear sear To burn, to whither, or to dry up backwards into my head to the makeshift of what I have already seen or heard described or dreamed about, too weary not to envy the world its useless outlines. Books of photographs of New York in the forties. The dark rhombus rhombus A four-sided shape, like a parallelogram. The window is shaped like a diamond on its side. See Wikipedia . of a window of a train rushing past my train. The dark halo around the body of a woman I love from something much farther than a distance. The world is insatiable. It takes your legs off It takes your legs off Donald Revell wrote in his book The Art of Attention: A Poet’s Eye(2007), “One of my favorite euphemisms is ‘legless,’ meaning drunk” , it takes your arms and parades in front of you such wonderful things, such pictures of warm houses trellised trellised An architectural term, meaning enclosed or supported. In many cases, a trellis is a kind of open latticework on which vines can grow. along the sides with green so deep it is like black air, only transparent, of women singing, of trains of lithium trains of lithium Lithium (lithium carbonate) has been used as a psychiatric medication to treat bipolar disorder and manic depression. A play on “train of thought”; as the third lightest element, “lithium” may be used to describe a lightness or airiness, complementing “transparent.” on the awakening body of a landscape or across the backdrop of an old city steaming and high-shouldered as the nineteen-forties. The world exhausts exhausts Used here in both senses: to tire and to expel exhaust everything except my eyes because it is a long walk to the world begun before I was born. In the far corner the dead woman bows off stage. The television crumples into a white dot crumples into a white dot Older tube televisions, when turned off, would have its picture quickly dissolve into a small white dot in the center of the screen as the last train of the evening, my train, is announced. I lived in one place. I want to die in another.