Facing The Other Way Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

I think of choirs like ghost trains
crisscrossing the prairies
of rich violet shadowed trestles

of the restless heart we all embody:
our American byways.
I dream of your folkloric remnants

stowed away from grade school remembrances
collections of cider tales, New England chill
the headless horseman thrills

and Rip returning to the village that cannot be again.
Hawthorne branding us with his own hauntings
and the much vaunted White Whale.Mellville Mellvile

the very seas sound the name.

set sail now, set forth like Whitman on the berry laden
country road or earlier Manhatten's scapes and the War's
dear, dread toll, embrace

through you we see the harbors as they were then
and all in all set true with green leaves bound
in fresh air, mystical rhyme oh out of the cradle

inexplicably beyond our own time snatched but merilly
are we all, are now yet resting in a great expansiveness, geniality

the light glancing off the busy waters wreathing his face.
we would bring sprigs of lilac too, to you Walt Whitman

at some old homeplace
for the elegy burgeoning in the soul from year to year

and centuries now the ghost train never disappearing
that bore old Abe. some poems are trains too.
some will think me corny, retrograde to remember these

things this way but oh, I do
and Sandburg's double named tales and the view out Emily's
lone and burnished window

cryptic, extravagant the things she knew
and quiet fruition
from the instant she surmised

and I, in the classroom too
suddenly grown too wise to

Death's horses, facing the other way.

mary angela douglas 11 october 2017