A Long Commute Home

By Art Nahill

Through language and imagery that is clear and engaging, these poems explore the metaphorical state of "commuting", of traveling from one place to another- from home to work, from childhood to young adulthood to middle age, from health to sickness, from one hemisphere to another- and the many lives that intersect with one's chosen trajectory along the way. These poems traverse the diverse landscapes of family and suburban life as they invite the reader on a journey that is warm, often humorous, and passionately human.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Art Nahill
• Release date: Jan 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310597602

Art Nahill

Art is an American-born doctor/writer whose work has appeared in may literary journals and magazines on both sides of the Pacific. He currently lives in Auckland with his wife and two sons where he practices adult medicine and teaches.

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A Long Commute Home

By Art Nahill

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © Art Nahill 2014

For my wife, Rhonda and my sons,

Evan and Cameron.

I.

   And lives go on.

      And lives go on.

Like sudden lights

   At street corners.

   Or like the lights

      In quiet rooms

Left on for hours,

Burning, burning.

            – Donald Justice

The Commuter

The sudden bareness

of her knees seems like the ending

to the sonnet he’s never finished

and when he discovers it’s neither Shakespeare

nor Wordsworth she’s reading

but a drugstore romance

(the pages dog-eared where

on other mornings

the windswept heroine had been abandoned

on the cliffs of ecstasy

or left to wander the treacherous swamp of unrequitedness)

he has the urge to show her the steadfast way

he poaches his eggs on rainy mornings

evenings how he arranges his watch

the day’s accumulation of coins

on his bedside table

how longing finds salvation

in temples of the ordinary: the lurch

and shudder of the train

after she has packed her purse

and disembarked at Park Street station

the women each morning

who remind him of late summer

gardens, that same blush

of sadness.

The Endurance

She presses herself

into the seat beside me

smooths her business-blue skirt

with the palms of her hands

as though a linen tablecloth

before the arrival of guests.

From a canvas bag

silk-screened with Monet’s Lilies

she pulls, of all things

a hardbound history

of Shackleton’s failed Antarctic expedition

splays it open on her lap

like a surgeon. I have noticed her before

on at Porter

off at Back Bay Station. I watch from behind

the cover of my novel

intrigued by the grainy faces of the crew

squinting into the unfamiliar

maw of the camera, impassive, stoical

lives compressed

into the immensity of time and snow –

– and the way she traces

with her finger the blackness heaped about

this one’s eyes, the set of another’s jaw

lingering over the Endurance

suffocating in the grip of the Weddell Sea

touching, pausing, touching

again as one might

a lover’s birthmark, the splintered masts

the bowsprit

the tangle of ropes so furiously encrusted

in ice.

Suburban Sestina

Beneath a rogue late-spring snow,

the city’s indifferent air,

commuters crowd shoulder to shoulder,

each burdened by an unspoken history

that on these mornings swells in the distance,

breaking across our lives like waves.

I find my usual seat on the train, wave

to you