by Robert Levine

Created on: March 13, 2007   Last Updated: May 14, 2007

WANDERING HOME

I
The silver face of the train rushed
from the horizon, a constant clanging
signaling its approach. Aunt Paula hugged me close;
the train's whir swept my father's graying hair
as he clasped my shoulders and joked,
"I've sort of gotten used to you," as if he figured
it was better late than never to say so.
My best friend pumped my hand
and told me, "You're doing something brave,

moving to where you don't know anyone."

I watched the scenery whisk by
after the train pulled out
of New Carrollton Station-the impassive stands
of oaks and sweetgums, the dull beige apartment buildings,
the flat black bands of road-as those
who cared about me returned home
to hooked rugs, plush pastel sofas,
framed crocheted samplers, and backyard pools.
I had loved these things while I lived with them,
but years of eavesdropping on other lives
in books had told me they weren't all
I had the capacity to love.

I was leaving for a university
in Boston, to prepare to become a poet.
I shot beyond the Maryland I had known
for twenty-two years like a stone from a sling,
and I relished my advance into difference.
Wilmington's recurrent series of narrow
stone row houses the color of mist at daybreak,
Philadelphia's chain-link-bounded blacktop lots
and abandoned warehouses frescoed with graffiti,
New Jersey's sprawling obsidian office buildings . . .
even the Bronx's tenement alleys
broken like Old World squares into courtyards
by weathered wooden staves strung with clotheslines
offered up their exotic influence.

But the railroad was only a seam in the landscape,
a margin to the page where life was written.
I could not see the faces of those
to whom these places meant everything.
I would never walk on their hooked rugs,
never sit on their plush pastel sofas,
or whatever adorned their homes instead.

Of course, the train was filled with people
whose company I silently shared-
the Ethiopian girl I overheard
responding, haltingly, to the Italian man
sitting beside her who effused about
his brother's wedding to an Ethiopian;
the woman in the seat behind,
enunciating into her cell phone
the changes she penciled on someone's proposal.
But all of them had their fabric
of belonging somewhere else, and would loop away
from the railroad's seam to join it again.
As we sped along Connecticut's
workerless docks and ossified spires of masts,
I tried to believe another warp and weft
waited for me to weave myself into.

The train pivoted northward around
the State House in Providence,
as white and, it seemed to me, as brittle
as alabaster high on its dignified

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