Poem-A-Day: Epistle: Leaving by Kerrin McCadden

Epistle: Leaving by Kerrin McCadden     Dear train wreck, dear terrible engines, dear spilled freight,           dear unbelievable mess, all these years later I think            to write back. I was not who I am now. A sail is a boat,            a bark is a boat, a mast is a boat and the train was you and me.            Dear dark, dear paper, dear files I can't toss, dear calendar            and visitation schedule, dear hello and goodbye.  If a life is one thing and then another; if no grasses grow            through the tracks; if the train wreck is a red herring;            if goodbye then sincerely. Dear disappeared bodies            and transitions, dear edge of a good paragraph.            Before the wreck, we misunderstood revision.  I revise things now. I teach pertinence. A girl in class told            us about some boys who found bodies on the tracks            then went back and they were gone, the bodies.            It was true that this story was a lie, like all things  done to be seen. I still think about this story, what it would            be like to be a boy finding bodies out in the woods,            however they were left--and think of all the ways they            could be left. There I was, teaching the building            of a good paragraph, dutiful investigator of sentences, thinking dear boys, dear stillness in the woods,           until, again, there is the boy I knew as a man            whose father left him at a gas station, and unlike the lie            of the girl's story, this one is true--he left him there for good.  Sometimes this boy, nine and pale, is sitting next to me, sitting there           watching trains go past the gas station in Wyoming,            thinking there is a train going one way, and a train            going the other way, each at different and variable speeds:            how many miles before something happens            that feels like answers when we write them down-- like solid paragraphs full of transitional phrases           and compound, complex sentences, the waiting space            between things that ends either in pleasure or pain. He           keeps showing up, dear boy, man now, and beautiful like the northern forest, hardwoods iced over.        Copyright © 2013 by Kerrin McCadden. Used with permission of the author.     About This Poem "I was thinking about synecdoche and the mathematics of meaning--how one thing can be something else, or a piece of it, and how this washes through a life. I wanted, also, to write a letter to the idea of leaving, and so this poem began to be what it is. What ends up being true, I think, is that meaning slips and slides; writing tries to catch it and hold it still."    --Kerrin McCadden Poem-A-Day Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-A-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on  weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day Archive.   June 21, 2013 Kerrin McCadden's first collection of poems,  Landscape with  Plywood Silhouettes, is forthcoming from New Issues Press in spring 2014. McCadden lives in Plainfield, Vermont. Related Poems Dear J. by Kazim Ali Poetry by Monica Ferrell Language by W.S. Merwin   Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.

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