Best Poems - Transportation

“I watch the morning traffic report
to learn my new geography.

Traffic.  More of an adjective
than noun in these parts.

How did you get here? Traffic.
How close are you? Traffic.
How are you doing? Traffic.

Despite stares, suspicion,
I walk. Tap Card
in back pocket,

I walk.

When it comes to weapons
on wheels, I’d rather not
pull the trigger myself.”

for my mother

“We visited the World’s Fair
thirteen times and saved a brochure
from every pavilion.
When you were my age then,
with a Heinz pickle pin
on a brownie collar,
you trooped through the Dawn of a New Day,
the World of Tomorrow;
marched up the Helicline
and saw Billy Rose’s Aquacade.
You went back for the thrill
of stepping on a board that yelled,
‘ouch, that hurts’ or ‘don’t tread on me.’
GM’s bright Futurama between
the Great Depression
and the Second Great War.
I put 50 cents in a machine
at the Sinclair pavilion and it produced
a fresh warm plastic dinosaur.
That was man and science—
dinosaur to oil, oil to plastic.
I wanted and got another.
You wanted to teach the family possibilities,
to show man’s clever exhibitions,
but the future I came away with
was an entire house
of impermeable Formica where I wept
because my brother was lost
for the fifth time that season
and you’d gone to some hamburger-
shaped tent to pick him up again.”

“this morning on the news
i heard about a woman
in a new cadillac
waiting for a parking place
outdone by a young man
in a red sports car
who said as he got out:
that’s what you can do
when you’re young and agile.
my sympathies
don’t usually lie with
people driving cadillacs
but i was right there with her
in that hog of a car
my foot to the floor
ramming it into that red sport
saying as we got out
to look at the damage:
that’s what you can do
when you’re old and rich.”

“I like to see it lap the miles,
And lick the valleys up,
And stop to feed itself at tanks;
And then, prodigious, step

Around a pile of mountains,
And, supercilious, peer
In shanties by the sides of roads;
And then a quarry pare

To fit its sides, and crawl between,
complaining all the while
In horrid, hooting stanza:
Then chase itself down hill

And neigh like Boanerges;
Then, punctual as a star,
Stop—docile and omnipotent—
As its own stable door.”

“The railroad buildings, dingied
by scores of soot-years, 
thrusting their ugly rears
at your train window, are 
a sign of man’s decay.
Once, I took a train
instead of a bus. A bus
takes you on a highway
lined with filling stations
& lunchcarts. A train
runs smack through the 
forest. I wanted to
study the forest in October
and I took a train.
        It was astonishing to read
what I read about October
the following day. I thought
I had it all figured out—
I thought the lonely little 
houses, lost in the middle
of great tawny grass,
shaggy copper skies and
mottled orange forests, were
full of fine humanity that
I was missing.  Instead, the 
writer informed me that
it was chlorophyll that
colored the leaves. I
thought I had all the
significance of October
under my hat & pasted.
I thought that October
was a tangible being, 
with a voice. The 
writer insisted it was
the growth of corky cells
around the stem of the
leaf. The writer also
said that to consider
October sad is to be 
a melancholy Tennysonian.
October is not sad, he
said. October is falling
leaves. October comes
between Sept. & Nov. I
was amazed by these facts,
especially about the
Tennysonian melancholia. I
always thought October was 
a kind old Love-light.”

“Ancient granny
drags her bag
gasping, wheezing
towards the gate
Security will let her wear 
her shoes

She throttles and snorts
flings her purple
pocketbook onto the belt
slings her steel-plated
bangle beads
into the bin, from her

carry-on she pulls out
a can of Lysol spray,
her Chinese star and brass
knuckles, her newly
sharpened meat cleaver
She reaches into her

cleavage, gasps, extracts
an ice pick. The TSA officers
are trying to speak
She isn’t finished yet
drops her winter coat
and furry ski vest into the

bin, unbuckles her color-
coordinated crocodile
leather belt
Behind her a crowd
is building up
The TSA is sending for

reinforcements
She pulls off her
turtleneck,
the sleeves 
gesture skyward
She drops her purple

skirt to the floor,
pirouettes in her
purple Playtex Ultimate Lift
and Bali One Smooth U brief
yee-hah
She flips the Chinese star

into the machinery
The crowd divides into
pros and cons
When she picks up
the meat cleaver
they scatter

She offers the agents
a swig from her
three-ounce bottle
of Smirnoff’s
On the other side
of the metal detector

a TSA 20-something
is staring at her large
brass navel ring
The alarm bleats, she rasps
Pat me down, sonny
Pat me down”

“I ride
the ‘A’ train
and feel
like a ball-
bearing in a roller skate.
I have on a gray
rain-
coat.  The hollow
of the car
is gray.
My face 
a negative in the slate
window,
I sit
in a lit
corridor that races
through a dark
one. Strok-
ing steel,
what a smooth rasp—it feels
like the newest of knives
slicing
along
a long
black crust loaf
from West 4th to 168th.
Wheels
and rails
in their prime
collide,
make love in a glide
of slickness
and friction.
It is an elation
I wish to pro—
long.
The station
is reached
too soon.”