STOPTREIN THROUGH HAARLEM

STOPTREIN THROUGH HAARLEM

It’s June 14, 1993, I’m sitting by the window of the two-storey stoptrein

            with neon lime plastic seats. It’s raining again, diamonds come to mind.

                        I don’t like comparing rain on glass to diamonds;

                                    the word apartheid was invented here.

Returning from the Rotterdam poetry reading,

            I know the express train always arrives first,

            though it leaves much later,

                         but I’m too impatient to wait for it. 

On the platform, a poster announces the arrival of the Harlem Globe Trotters.

            The train sign, Haarlem with its two aa’s reminds me of where I am.

I’m borderless, night has fallen, the  water fragments into shards of darkness and light.

I didn’t know I liked the easiness of comparing water to broken glass.

I didn’t know that in this country of canals, the ghettos of the past would follow me

(like the tail of this train);

            or that the common thread between my disparate journeys and lovers

                        would be both the noose and the lifeline.

                                    That I’d become mute from witnessing too much.

At the reading, a Mexican poet recognizes me

            from the photo on an old chapbook, Falling to Sea Level,

            given to him years ago,

                        and asks if I am la mujer de John.

                                                — I say ¡No, es finito! es kaput!

I don’t like mixing languages or speaking ill of those I once wished to be dead

            in metaphors of dear John letters,

                        or being identified by their bedsheets.

There is reason enough to be concerned, I am living below sea level

            with another man I will leave behind on the train,

                                                and there are others.

Near midsummer, the northern light extends its boundaries toward midnight.

I am still in the dark. I don’t like being jealous of poets whose work does not move me.

Someone asks, What makes it a poem? I am at a loss for words and I don’t like it.

I’m a true Californian, born with car keys in my mouth, unused to the rote faith

            others place in trains which always arrive on time, and at the proper place.

            It seems I am destined to circle the outskirts of the city by night,

                        always on the wrong train, either going nowhere in a hurry,

                                    or stopping at every obscure station ath 3 AM,

                                                in search of the right platform.

Or worse yet, the train doesn’t go to the final station, but plunges toward the darkness of its origin.

            No stoptrein, it roared with a mighty vengeance back to Rotterdam,

            the point of destination doppleganging with the point of departure,

            everything replaying in reverse, Möbius time slipping out from under me,

            Amsterdam (and bed) so close, I could almost taste the city lights,

            I didn’t like sitting by the window, crying like a lost child in my 4th decade

            because I was in the wrong language and didn’t understand the equasion of broken tracks.

           

I remember a train ride across Ireland; I was 19—my first time away from home—

horses galloping after the fox, the ruined castle tower against billowing sky.

I knew I wanted to live there, had lived there in a past life,

the concept of home buried in the simultaneous suspension

between the pillars of ancestral memory and déjà vu;

the broken trailhead of lovers at my feet.

I just remembered the how Belgian lowlands rose imperceptably like a slow sigh,

            the fields of grain giving way to the urgency of the Swiss Alps,

            the village lights so high above us, I mistook them for the stars.

            I  waited on tables, mute, unable to speak, except in the language of food.

I rode tiny cog railways, loved the way the clouds unveiled the secret faces of the mountains slowly—            Jungfrau, Schilthorn, Eiger—I knew their beauty was too much to see all at once,

            like that of Medusa’s, my eyes did not turned to stone.

I didn’t like being alone in a strange country with no way home; the airlines bankrupt.

I didn’t like how it soured my perception of beauty;

            the separation of ice and stone, not equal to the whole.

I didn’t like waiting in England for my emergency plane ticket,

            I rode to Inverness with a madwoman, didn’t spot the Loch Ness monster.

Came home to a man for seven years, and became a writer when it ended.

The Mexican poet, Victor Manuel, smiles at me so beautifully,

I am reminded of alps and train rides through the Andes to Lake Titicaca with my middle-aged lover,  

the poet who left me at the end of the trip for a 19-year-old blonde with cheaper words.  

Sleeping in the underbelly of the southern continent I dream they removed Lenin’s shroud.

Hammer and Sickle stenciled on the wall of the Inca fort. Andean flute music:

¿Que Condor Pasa? The highest railroad pass in Peru takes our breath away.

In the 2nd-class car with no light, we sit on boards propped in the aisles with restless chickens.

Soldiers have stopped the train; they bayonet the Indians’ luggage, looking for coca leaves.

A myopic Frenchman crawls out to take a piss, a thief steals the glasses from his face—

For the gold. The mines of Potosi no longer productive.

Bolivia shines with the deceptive white of purity, or death.

The Frenchman blindly fumbles his way back to his seat.

I can still see him pinching his pale one-eyed cock by the foreskin like a naked rat.

In the suffocating heat thick with flies, we take turns sleeping.

At the biological experiment station, we watch llamas mate while lying down.

            Sendero Luminosos will slaughter these same animals a few nights hence.

Darkness is descending, fearing for our belongings, maybe even our lives,

            I rage at John who crawls back to the Pullman where five US dollars

            “buys” us first class, air-conditioned seats. How simple.

Titicaca parts like the Red Sea on both sides of the train.

We have reached the promised land.

* * *

Moscow Nights. This is not poet Nazim Hikmet’s Prague-Berlin train;

I never knew I liked the way he compared night to a tired bird on a smokey wet plain.

I know I am not writing this from a known prison;

            and I don’t know if the guards are beating another prisoner,

                        or if I’m imagining things.

I know the guerillas blew up the electrical plant Independence Eve,

            the explosion rocked Lima,

            I finished my soupa criolla in darkness,

                        the stacatto of guns in the distance.

I didn’t know the body we found the next morning was of the famous lawyer, named after flowers.

I didn’t know we would be among the first to see him in death.

I didn’t know that my life might depend on the difference

of knowing Soviet and Israeli guns upon sight.

That I’d see so many dead men,

            or that I’d throw three fetesus back into the sea

                        at the request of the men who loved me,

                                    or that John’s would be the last.

I never knew I’d bear witness to all these things before I was 40 years old,

            or that I’d have to lose my heart in order to write a poem on things I didn’t know I loved.

I know my escape to another country will bring other forms of exhile. It’s August, 1989,

I don’t know the Berlin Wall will fall, or that the aftershock of eastern bloc countries

            like so many dominos, will lose their boundaries.

Or that the velvet revolution will curtain another kind of darkness.

I have some questions for the cosmonaut stranded in space three months after his country disappeared,

            did his shrinking heart find the capacity to love again,

            could he still look into the night sky without finding dispair,

                                    what was worse, the exile or the abandonment?

Cherkassy, on the Dniper River, picnics amid the haystacks; shashlik and summer tomatoes.

I sleep on the living room couchbed of my soon-to-be-lover who’s married;

            we blame it on the erotic poetry we’ve been translating.

                        It undoes us like slow mother-of-pearl buttons.

Leaving the Ukraine in the private car #17, a communist party official coach,

I think I’m pregnant again; 40 days later the deluge comes. I hear the blonde

leaves John S. for another woman.             Poetic justice.

New Year’s Eve, 1990. In the square, a masked stranger kisses me; the sound of ice falling.

We return to Moscow in car #17; I have bronchitis and a strained back;

the tickets cost a half a month’s salary, we celebrate by eating cherries in brandy.

Oleg enters slowly, but I hurt too much. The paneling is of cherrywood.

In Red Square I stand transfixed, snow falls on the writhing madness of St. Basil’s domes.

I don’t know if  Ivan the Terrible really put out the architect’s eyes,

or if it’s another story. All this languid squalor and and false beauty.

At the Pushkin Museum, Matisse’s Goldfish has me in tears.

None of us knows the USSR will cease to exist in two years.

I never knew red carnations in the snow by Lenin’s tomb would affect me so, and

I never expected to be on a 2nd-class cattle car train enroute from Moscow to Leningrad 

without official permission, not able to speak English, or risk facing deportation.

Mid-winter, six people to an open compartment; tow more in the aisle.

18 hours of human stench, mildewed winter clothing and wet fur, coal fumes, kilbasa-kilbasa;

I long for sweet tea from the rough capable hands of the Dizhurnia.

The crone carrying flowers to a funeral and I come to blows over gladioli

and sleeping benches. Oleg says, You’re a real Soviet Citizen now!

We cuddle a few moments in an upper bunk under the glare of six pairs of eyes

and a light bulb that will burn most of the night. Privacy is a western affectation.

Why are all the train stations half-way across town?

I didn’t know he would come to live with me in America nine months

            where our own private hell would be born.

Another 15-hour ride from Cherkassy to Moscow and the US.  

            In the dark we manage a sleight of hand, and eat more cherries in brandy.

It’s August, 1991, after the coup. I fall in love with a famous Soviet has-been pop singer at Fort Ross.

            He lives in Leningrad,

                        only now it’s called Petersburg. He calls me his Conchita, only I’m no nun.

At the Hotel Kosmos the singer gives a speech in Russian, hands me flowers

The interpreter said, He proposes marriage. What is your answer?

I’m speechless, but the train takes me back to the Ukraine, to my ex-lover.

Oleg and I say our final goodbyes at the platform.

The American businessman Paul, holds me in car #17 from Moscow to Kiev

            and back again to Moscow, and to Petersburg.

The singer and I live in Petersburg. He’s devoutly orthodox,

that, and the language barrier eventually eroded the love.

Living in sin made him uneasy.

            Returning by train from Ekaterina Dvorets, I said yes.

We saw the Summer Palace in winter,

            the solstice approached, the Soviet Union would cease to exist Dec. 31,         

                        but by then I’d be home.

My American friend Maryna came to visit; we knew we were an island of sanity

in a country of crazy people. She said, I was married to a fanatic.

We rode to Moscow and in the quiet dark of the rocking train, making love in the lower bunk becomes a game, my hand over his mouth. On the way back, orgasms in the darkness halfway between the two cities, a frozen land, isolated farms, and the erratic platform lights illuminating our compartment.

The next summer, on my way to Russia with an enormous pile of luggage, a computer and a printer, I stopped in Vienna to visit a high school friend, we went on to Hungary. I was in a dither, should I marry Valera? Did I even love him? I wandered the streets of Budapest alone and found no answers; Ken had a Hungarian girlfriend. He had to go back to Vienna a few days before me and would meet me on the 4 O’clock train in Vienna. An ironic aside, the only language I had in common with many Hungarians was the bastard Russian I’d picked up in Petersburg. No matter, their Russian was as bad as mine. It was a common yezik, or tongue.

I waited for hours in line at the train station to validate my Eurail pass, but Soviet bureaucracy was still in action though the Soviets left in ’86. Minutes before the Vienna train was about to leave, I made a dash for it, committing myself by throwing my luggage onto the floor, but the train began to roll away from the platform with my luggage on it just as I attempted a four-point landing. My camera rucksack caught on the door, I was thrown off-balance, teetering on the edge, holding on for dear life, my waterbottle clattered onto the tracks. A conductor came to my rescue, running alongside the train, he literally shoved my behind through the door, I sprawled in an undignified heap over my luggage, shaken but more-or-less intact. Fortunately this caper was witnessed by the ticket agent who saw my dilemma (I was riding the train illegally again, this time without a valid ticket) and let me ride to Vienna for free, saying I should get it validated there.

Ken and I had made plans to go onto Amsterdam together, but he ran out of time and said he would ride with me as far as Frankfurt, where his plane was leaving from. A last day in Vienna, we decide on the night train. I see no train listed; Amstel is the Austrian name for Amsterdam. At 10 PM we head to the track, and wait an hour, assuming it’s been delayed. The train being loaded is a freight train, but it says Amstel on it. I’m fuming, first class consists of four seats that don’t pull out into beds like the other trains. Our last supper together, I angrily uncork the Hungarian wine, intent on getting drunk fast as possible.

The conductor comes by, surprised, she speaks little French, Ken speaks no German. Somehow she conveys to him, you must get off at the next station, ride back one stop, and they will flag down the train that will take you to Frankfurt. Great! Not only am I not going to Amsterdam with Ken, but I’m being abandoned in the middle of the night, with sacks of mail and toiletpaper as my only companions. I barely manage to whittle my rage from a blind one into a low rage. We hug, say our goodbyes. I get out my pillow and night things. He gets off the train. The conductor sees me still on the train, tells me to get off too. It turns out Amstel is also a small village in the Austrian Alps. The train’s beginning to roll, I grab my mountains of luggage, my nighty, my snoozle pillow, the food and wine, throw them out the door to Ken, and barely make it out. We’re in the of hamlet St. Pauli, at one AM with no hotel rooms to be had at any price. We sleep in the waiting room benches, periodic trains shaking us awake.

Six AM, we get on a commuter train, wild-eyed travelers among the placid businessmen, ride across Germany (a billboard of a pig on a satin pillow—we knew we’d crossed the border). At several train platforms, I try to call Vins, my friend in Amsterdam, but these trains run on time, 4 minutes isn’t enough time to place an international call. I’m getting adept at jumping on rolling trains. An eight-minute stop, I reach Vins to tell him the change of plans. We figured out where we went wrong—there’s no through train to Amsterdam. We should have taken the train to Köln, Cologne, and changed there for Amsterdam. Ken gets off in Frankfurt. I remember to change trains in Köln, visit the cathedral, arrive in Amsterdam that evening. The Netherlands are like the paintings I saw at the Hermitage. Peter the Great lived in Amsterdam for a while.

Vins is late. The train station is scary with so many druggies, etc. Ten years has aged Vins, I barely recognize him, my college classmate and friend.  Originally I was to stay with him a few days before catching the train to Petersburg, but at the last minute I find out Valera is singing in Odessa until the end of the month. We’d put off the inevitable for years, Vins and I had never been lovers, the timing was never right. More house guests, a lack of bedding. . . The day I was to leave for Russia approached, horrible nightmares . . . the migraines came back, my body saying no in the only way it knew, through illness. At the train station as I was making my reservation, I told Vins I wasn’t going to Russia, turning my back on Valera wasn’t as hard as I thought. I was relieved I’d finally come to a decision, any decision after months of ambiguousness. I stay in Amsterdam another two months. We enter into our own private hells, the fighting, worse than any I’d experienced, leave me shaken. We leave things in the air.

Two months later, Vins best friend Jan comes to San Francisco, we spend three weeks photographing the homeless over the holidays. Vins writes me long love letters, I’m a moth circling Jan’s light, but he tells me he’s bisexual, having broken up with his girlfriend, Pietje. We enter into other complicated equations that will come to fruition the next summer when I return to Holland for Poetry International in Rotterdam. Jan telling Vins of his sexploits—especially with me (as far as it went) festered, an ugly wound manifests in the form of revenge. I told Vins I was no man’s property, this is why I didn’t go to Russia. Though Jan and I are star-crossed lovers, he stands me up at the Duerne train station, I waited all day, then ride back to Eindhoven, missing Vins by one train, It gives me a long time to consider my situation. I’ve about had it, but we all hurt inside.

It seems I am always on the wrong train, either going nowhere in a hurry, or stopping by every obscure station in the middle of the night in search of a platform, or on the train that doesn’t stop. The one time I did manage to catch the fast train from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, an hour-and-a-half ride, it made an unscheduled return halfway—from Schiphol back to Rotterdam—the point of destination doppleganging with the point of departure, everything replaying in reverse, Möbius time slipping out from under me, Amsterdam (and bed) so close, I could see the city lights, but the train was plunging again into darkness back towards Rotterdam, those obscure stations, a blur. No stoptrein, it roared with a mighty vengeance back to the direction where I’d come from.

Riding that train, dividing fragments of time until it was nearly dawn, reminded me of the story of the race that never ends because it never begins because first, you have to get half-way there. In order to make it half way, you need to travel half that distance, and so on. It brings you back to the beginning. Stasis in search of the whole picture, both coming and going. I arrived home at dawn in a downpour. Vins was asleep, but I knew it was over. Somehow, when you have to struggle that hard to go home and still it eludes you, it’s time to pay attention to the fact that maybe the train never even left the station.