Then I came to a juncture in my life
in which I was like a child taking a train
to the city for the first time, back
before the advent of cell phones and laptops,
when even light-up watches were a novelty.
So that, though it had been bright morning,
even through the train’s darkened windows,
there is nothing now, not even aisle lights
when the train enters the tunnel
connecting the city to the mainland,
and everything becomes quiet—
not that the noise of the train’s wheels
against the rails, the constant whirring,
has ceased, if anything it seems louder,
but quiet of human sounds, as if everyone
understands that here, in this stretch
of the journey, it is better not to speak.
The tunnel, long as tunnels go, is lined
with tile, once white, now matte gray
with exhaust, and the child sees behind
each the force of water, imagines a tile
popping out and green river rushing in,
then other squares around it also popping out.
But he knows too, because his father has
told him, that the tunnel is not just under
the river, but under the rock under the river,
and this is almost worse, that if the train
broke down, he would be stuck there,
already buried. So he too stays quiet,
trying not to add the slightest disturbance
to the air, and maybe everyone else
has made the same calculation. He can
still see the sides of their arms in the seats
ahead of him all the way up the aisle,
but it is like they are not there. Soon
he will burst—his father also told him this—
into a hive of motion. He has been made
to memorize which escalators to take,
which turns, where to sit to wait
for his brother: a weaving through densely
peopled corridors where he must not
stop or talk to anyone. But that feels
very far off, the train yet to rear up,
to breach the water surface like a great
whale and spit him out on the hard sand
of another country. For now, it seems
he will travel below rock forever—
stuck in his seat, growing old there—
and that to speak even a single word
will bring it all down on him.
Benjamin S. Grossberg’s latest poetry collection, My Husband Would (Tampa), won the 2021 Connecticut Book Award. His other books include Space Traveler and Sweet Core Orchard (both from Tampa); the latter received a Lambda Literary Award.
