Fellow Travellers
Oct 7 2013


In the off-hours
there are empty seats.
No strangers, knees clenched

pressed against each other.

When you can feel the heat

of human bodies,
skin-to-skin
but for cotton sleeves
thin pants. 

Eyes downcast,
or looking up
at back-lit ads,

expertly tuning out.

Like a well-rehearsed ensemble

we all sway

with the subway car's motion,  

leaning in, letting go

like swimmers lolling

in ocean swells.
Fellow travellers, for now
in this small hermetic car.

In the big city
the weight of anonymity
frees me
as much as it oppresses.
Each commuter
lips sealed

with the thousand mile stare.
And each impassive face,
unknowable

and never seen again,
as if to say
there is no consequence

do as you please.
Freeing me
to reinvent myself.

Or, taken to extremes
might just as well
not be,

a drowning man

who simply slips beneath the waves

without a struggle.

But behind averted eyes, inscrutable face
is a parallel universe
of rich emotion

bottomless pain.

And I remind myself
that every one of them
no matter how unlikely
is loved,

that someone, somewhere

hangs on their return.
That when I hunger for air
beneath the depth of feeling,
just imagine a million times as much
in the cruel city.
It overwhelms me to think
of a universe that is infinite,
when even this tiny sliver
is too much,
borne down

by such unbearable weight

of suffering.

Which is why I re-read the ads,
sit, like a small Pacific island
in its coral reef
flanked by empty seats.
And why my fellow travellers
sink without a trace.
Mercifully vanish
as I head for the platform,
await the silky hiss
of the sliding doors.

When I'm in the big city, emerging from the Island airport into the noisy heart of downtown, I find myself overwhelmed by the immensity of crowds, the powerful sense of alienation and unreality, and the way the feeling of anonymity both extinguishes and frees me.

Thrown together for a few minutes on the subway with total strangers, there is the odd intimacy of fellow travellers, accompanied by a sense of absolute social isolation. When I resist the urge to see “the other” not as cardboard outlines and obstacles but as loved and valued people, when I allow myself to imagine the depth of feeling of a single person multiplied millions of times, the accumulation of suffering and pain overwhelms me utterly. I immediately step back into the bearable solitude of the self. One can experiment only so long with extreme empathy, with a Zen-like dissolving of personal boundary and ego, before retreating back into the safety of solipsism.

This is a good example of how differently poetry and prose go about doing the same thing. Because the 2 preceding paragraphs say what I wanted to say with clear exact precision -- as when I was first taught the proper way to write an essay:  say what you’re going to say …say it …then say what you said. While the poem, far less direct, doesn't say so much as show. Which I think is more powerful. Because the reader experiences it as narrative rather than assertion. And because, in the distillation and compression of poetry, as will as in its music, there is a good chance a telling line might stay with the reader, keep doing its work well after the poem's been heard.