The Permanent Way by Meg Day

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend September 29, 2016   The Permanent Way   Meg Day

Steamtown National Historic Site was created in 1986 to                          preserve the history of steam railroading in America,                                concentrating on the era 1850 through 1950.   We weren’t supposed to, so we did       what any band of boys would do & we did it the way they did in books       none of us would admit we stole from our brothers & kept hidden   under bedskirts in each of our rooms:       dropped our bicycles without flipping their kickstands & scaled the fence       in silence. At the top, somebody’s overalls snagged, then my Levi’s, & for a few deep   breaths, we all sat still—grouse in a line—       considering the dark yard before us, how it gestured toward our defiance—       of gravity, of curfews, of what we knew of goodness & how we hoped we could be     shaped otherwise—& dared us to jump.         And then we were among them, stalking their muscled silhouettes as our own        herd, becoming ourselves a train of unseen movements made singular,   never strangers to the permanent way       of traveling through the dark of another’s shadow, indiscernible to the dirt.         Our drove of braids & late summer lice buzz cuts pivoted in unison   when an engine sighed, throwing the moon       into the whites of our eyes & carrying it, still steaming, across the yard to a boilerman,       her hair tied up in a blue bandana. Somewhere, our mothers were sleeping   prayers for daughters who did not want women       to go to the moon, who did not ask for train sets or mitts. But here—with the moon       at our feet, & the whistle smearing the cicadas’ electric scream, & the headlamp   made of Schwinn chrome, or a cat’s eye       marble, or, depending on who you asked, the clean round scar of a cigarette       burn on the inside of a wrist so small even my fingers could fasten around   it—was a woman refilling the tender       in each of us. We watched her the way we’d been told to watch       our brothers, our fathers: in quiet reverence, hungry all the while.            Copyright © 2016 Meg Day. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “Much of my youth was spent on family road trips to National Parks—I can map with ease the different phases of my childhood and adolescence based on the geography of the parks system in the United States. In many ways, the NPS was how I learned about this country and the people who lived in it; ‘The Permanent Way’ attempts to correct some of the omissions in that early education, of which there were many.” —Meg Day   Meg Day is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014). Day teaches at Franklin & Marshall College and lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Poetry by Day   Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014)  "Always on the Train" by Ruth Stone "An Evening Train" by Timothy Liu "In the Park" by Maxine Kumin Imagine Our Parks with Poems   This poem was commissioned by the Academy of American Poets and funded by a National Endowment for the Arts Imagine Your Parks grant. Imagine Your Parks grants celebrate the centennial of the National Park Service and the 50th anniversary of the NEA by supporting projects that use the arts to engage people with the memorable places and landscapes of the National Park System in 2016. 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.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038