REMEMBERING
FRANK |
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Photo: Ed Thrasher - from
the album "A Man Alone"
A Thought for Today
One man will always make a difference.
Frank Sinatra would have been eighty-five today and he would have hated it. For a man so celebrated only those around him got excited about his later birthdays. All his life he celebrated personal accomplishments and insisted on moving on to others.
A well done album, a day that went especially smooth, a role in a film that ended up looking effortless because he had put so much thought into it, a concert that came off without a hitch - the interplay with the orchestra on stage and the way he could orchestrate an audience on a particular night were all causes for little personal celebrations. Pride in every new corner turned by each of his children.
When he turned seventy he was not amused, seventy-five was the pits. It wasn't age or infirmness that bothered him it was the continual reexamination of his life that consumed his later years. Regrets? No. Always a sense of more to do.
RM 12/12/2000 Previously unpublished.
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THIS ABOUT TRAINS
To the memory of Frank Sinatra |
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Frank Sinatra had a big wide heart he shared with many. He also had the biggest, most beautiful train set I ever saw. We had trains in common and more than once we played with trains together and spoke of times gone by and Johnny
Mercer. One day I'll write about all that, for now here's a new poem about trains dedicated to the 'head engineer.'
This about trains.
Clickity, clickity, in heart and head,
puffing hills and coasting down,
red-bandanaed engineers wave on,
high up in cabins
over rows of silver throttles,
mind machinery.
Every boxcar different from the one gone by;
red cabooses heading through the tunnel last.
A train is heady stuff for kids on hills--
ask Saroyan; call up Sandburg's ghost.
To those of us with hobo hearts
the Johnny Mercer in us all
is proof that freights are still
the boyhood/manhood dream.
I go about my boxcar business,
still tripping ties
between the rails that sing
and down below the ever-vocal telegraph.
The harmonies of rail and line
and my own whistling above them both
bring ground squirrels from their burrows
on the right of way.
They hind-end sit like kangaroo in miniature,
then race and tumble in their play.
This about railroads.
Each tie connecting them at foot-plus intervals
was set in place by human hands
only bursting heart and callus day-work understands.
American as blue skies over brown earth,
fertile land,
the railroad is the ribbon tied up by Chicago knot
that fed a nation growing up
when airplanes were but clumsy,
ill-tempered birds.
This about trains disappearing.
Taking with them something of reality,
another part of freedom bound away
to scrap heap or the river bottom.
Dead and mourned but little in their passing,
yet everlasting in the heart.
The shoulder no more shouldering
the bright-as-starlight gleaming rail
set down to meet another.
The mind no longer traveling ahead
to where the railroads hub and meet.
Something of quality
goes with the rail upended,
boiled and bent to bumpers
for the Model T or whatever.
Part of the country not to be recovered
moves off when cars are disconnected,
left at sidings and forgotten.
This about trains.
They are not missed,
for they are no less real
for being conjured.
But trains cannot be told
the way a favored fairy tale
can be regurgitated, different every time.
So generations happening on this
or other railroad maps
will never know them.
One more thing that even picture books
have precious little space for.
-from "A Safe Place to Land," 2000. Previously unpublished. |
