I live in a rural area now. I love being outside, so a lot of the imagery that I use for my poetry comes from observations about nature. However, I do love the urban landscape, too, the way many lives twine and collide within a confined space.
I’ve been thinking about the wordless graphic novel, The Arrival, watching the snow fall, and remembering my time living in the city. I once had a friend, Joe, who spoke as if he were a poet. One day we remarked on how winter in Minneapolis revealed a whole new vision of time. Paths appeared in the snow tracing the passage of people across the landscape. Suddenly a person could see where he had been, as if he were a dog who could sniff the scent of yesterday on today’s ground.
Which got me thinking about how some paths are created by lots of feet traveling away from one place toward some future held out there on a stick just beyond reach, and some paths are created by one person whose leaving is always followed by a return through the back lots of a life. There’s a dignity in that.
#walkmyworld
Photo Credit: Thomas Leuthard via Compfight
Some Paths Return
From thirty years and the
third floor window a man leans forward,
squints, eyes following
a path in the snow that winds
past the dumpsters and metal pipe in the
back lot of the Hydraulic Jack and Lift Company,
through the strewn green-copper fins
behind Karl’s Radiator Repair and on,
snaking over the railroad tracks that
slice between the black-ice roar of
I-35 and the brick-clad bars that line
Riverside Drive, where the
yellow-light of blues and
beer spills through wavy plate glass
onto winter’s old snow.
Angry men slug it
out the back door, sanctified
by the night.
Elsewhere, ruts still line the old Oregon Trail,
monument to the multitudes
whose hoped for West,
whose dreamed departure
dragged each through the mud and prairie grass,
under sun and over mountains. Yet
solitude, too, assembles some paths,
a single set of feet applied over and over to
the same spot of ground, a
visible history of persistence,
eroded by time and the return trip.
© Steve Peterson, 2014
Here’s me reading:
Steve, I smiled when I read about your friend Joe, who speaks as if he is a poet. Everything you write rings of poetry to me! I particularly love the way you ended this poem. You inspire me.
Oh, Jan. Thank you so much for reading. This poetry stuff only fits this blog because it comes from the same place in me. I get nervous posting it. I’m hoping that others who aren’t into it will just click through. 🙂
I hope you have some time to write. Send me a poem if you want an adoring reader! 🙂
First of all, “what Jan said.”
Then, I loved following the path with my eyes/through the eyes of the man in the third story window. And the contrast of that other, older path (my dad’s cousin has a pasture of unbroken prairie with those ruts still visible in it). And the last two lines.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for reading and offering a comment, Mary Lee. I’m intrigued by the ruts in the pasture. I remember seeing some in the High Plains somewhere near one of the 2-lanes that slice through that landscape, also by that phrase “unbroken prairie.” I know it means unbroken by the plow, but as a prairie lover, it also means other things to me in a Humpty-Dumpty kind of way. 🙁
The story of your discipline has inspired me to write more, by the way. Thanks!!
The imagery in your poem is very powerful, on a lot of levels (visual and metaphorical) and I particularly liked this line:
“solitude, too, assembles some paths…”
Thanks for sharing your words.
Kevin
Oh Kevin! Thank so much for reading and offering a comment. The man might have been me when I realized that the snowy ground wrote a history, of sorts, of my travels to and fro (and evidence of my preference for the back lots over the sidewalk). I got to thinking about how this path was mostly made by me, in a landscape filled with people, and told a story of return as much as it did of journey forth.
Thanks so much for taking the time to read and comment.
Thank you for sharing your poem. The imagery throughout the piece is powerful. I really am drawn to the last two lines (visible history of persistence, eroded by time and the return trip). I love how you make persistence visible.
Actually, I also really like a line from your blog post as well — “There’s a dignity in that.”
Thank you for dropping by to read this poem, Kristy. I really appreciate your thoughts about what worked for you. I’m still learning this craft (as you can tell!) and this poem isn’t finished, for sure. So any insights you can give me are very useful.
And, yes, about the dignity part. It strikes me that there is a lot of cultural capital earned through the road trip toward something “better”, less so for the return trip. I was hoping to capture just a bit of that sense in this poem.
Thanks!