When I Took the Train to Montauk
Adelaide Speaking
The Future Will be Devastatingly Attractive
The Importance of Perfect Palm Pressure in Ballroom Dancing
A journalist, a cop, and an actor walk into a wake
The Long Afterburn of Sam and Louisa
All-Time Favorites
Contemplating Widowhood
A Note on the Nursing Home Nightstand
The Benefits of Listening to a Song Over & Over & Over Again
Closer Reading
The Sunday Hike, an Exam
When I Took the Train to Montauk
Off-season, I aimed to walk east. I looked
up at an ocean-front porch, and saw a naked
guy covering his face instead of his parts.
Smart -- I truly couldn’t identify those
in a police lineup -- but counter to instinct.
When have I disappeared myself, while freeing
my wild animal? Long ago, popular teens imitated
the girl who limped, and I said nothing, blending in.
I’ve flirted illicitly at masked balls, scorched
an online fool with signature wit, no signature.
And yes I blew my nose in my ex’s socks,
mailed his new love a mean box of nothing.
Only with you, honey, only decades later,
could I unveil my better face, let loose
the raucous scamp to enjoy the wind and sun.
Show me my photos.
My living, nameless.
My dead are alive.
Invite me. Hug me.
What’s true for me
is not for you. I’m
dining with my dad
tonight. No I’m not
she. I’m in the room.
I can’t call it hunger.
Forks are tricky, so
finger-food please.
Play my favorite songs.
Hold my hand. I’m still
me. What’s true for you
is not for me. I can tell
you some stories. Lots
of snacks please. If I don’t
know you, don’t worry, I
probably love you anyway.
The Future Will be Devastatingly Attractive
It operates on the premise that health is contagious.
The future has a giant velvet rope across it,
urges: “Have a lick of empathy.”
In the future no one ever asks “You don’t know
who that is?” right after I ask who that is.
No more RSVPs saying “maybe”
or your apologies for how I interpreted your slight.
No more of those people who say “those people.”
The best schooling will be televised,
any skill or certificate desired, yours, free.
The professor draft tops the Nielsen ratings.
Suburban dads form fantasy faculty leagues.
I wish I had enacted it already.
I wish I had been more consoling.
I wish I could ever answer a personal
ad that gets it’s versus its wrong.
I stand by my predictions. The future will be
rightsized, enkinded. Decorporatized
and jasmine-scented. Set to music,
coated in 72% dark chocolate.
Moved into, convivial.
Soonest.
The Importance of Perfect Palm Pressure in Ballroom Dancing
When I was first an adult
a summer camp friend and I
started dating, roaming
Central Park in early cherry
blooms, taking swing dance
lessons, biking to the sea.
He’d grown a moustache
and started to resemble
a movie star, impressive
after his nervous persona
of chess club co-chair
and instigator of obscene
icing at the second annual
gingerbread man party.
I’d been sweet on him
even then, his involvement
with church tutoring, the way
he admired his writer uncle,
the soccer body, his devotion
to the Peace Corps dream.
But he was smitten with the girl
with the top class rank, talented
in physics, chemistry, biology, art,
literature, handwriting, quirkiness,
and a dark side. I’d been pretty
vigilant around my late virginity,
watching friends’ hearts break
after one-night stands, digging
in when I’d hear the male view
of my body as a baseball diamond,
so when this one made his simple
request and reason for it, “Hey,
it’s me,” it was the only line
I ever really, gladly, fell for.
A journalist, a cop, and an actor walk into a wake
The journalist, grateful not to be a photographer, pockets her notebook to blend in.
She signs her name behind the cop. Cops don’t pretend to be someone else for a living.
The cop is glad not to be an actor, feels the pot roast settling under his vest. Glances
at the coffin, takes a quick breath at the undertaker’s art, the difference three days makes.
The actor, happy not to be a corpse, kneels, weeps quietly. Then less quietly.
Survivors trade glances, perplexed. The cop squints, remembering why he’s here.
The journalist files past, looks at photos, imagines her children. Takes the brother-in-law
aside: the deceased loved Abercrombie & Fitch. Was deathly afraid of ladybugs.
The cop sits in the back, wishing he were undercover. Ladyfriend stumbles in, spots the actor,
and demands who the fuck let that trash in. Lunges for cravat, for neck.
The actor never gets to deliver his last words. The cop dives in, the journalist ducks. The mother howls like no animal heard before. Ladyfriend overpowers seventeen mourners.
Cop fires at the ceiling, takes an elbow to the eye. Backups club Ladyfriend, a cuff-and-stuff,
driven off. The journalist calls in her story. The deceased remains at peace.
The Long Afterburn of Sam and Louisa
He hollowed out a box for her, perfect, smooth, and cherry wood.
On empty nights after work he chiseled and sanded each side.
He put it in the boat he built, a sleek sea kayak named for her.
He found the cedar on the four high trails they’d hiked together,
cut it, then steamed it and bent it in water he carried down
from Lake Serene, her favorite. He carved the frame for her height.
He hadn't known abundance when he saw its tiniest toe print.
It was all of her, and his future. And then he sent it away.
Now she travels with a double stroller, a woman, he imagines,
who has grieved, and doubted, failed, and grown. She favors
a shallow bright green bay full of wildlife, a petri dish, a wild quilt
compared to his desert. He harvests honey from sage and willow bees.
Then he distills it, and christens her boat with that liqueur. He keeps it
safe, indoors. In the box, a feather from a thrush he thinks she loved,
the pen she forgot she gave him, a photo of them she never saw.
Nearby, a candle, a journal, in a room with white rugs, made for one.
She hears second hand about his half-hearted, slow motion, long-distance loves,
pet cats, continuing search for the moral compass. And even though she knows
nothing about changes 15 years have brought, she remembers the end back then,
when he erased all liking, respect, and trust. Still, how to explain the thrill,
dark and hidden behind the head Girl Scout in charge, that maybe someone
loves her obsessively. She wouldn't do anything about it of course, except curse
the shiver when she feels it, bring it out and turn it from side to side, observing,
as the naturalist's boat veers quickly, in a soft sway, to her stop on Ascension Bay.
I collect obscure songs, from movies, church, or childhood,
several from Seattle’s Sunday night song circle, a random tune
from a star’s later, less famous album, one the background
to a Civil War letter home, more suggested by algorithms.
They’re hoarded bundles of feeling, easy to share on a list
for a crush or a friend with cancer, to ask a fine guitarist
“have you done this one yet, and if not, maybe could you?”
What do they have in common? Some lament—soundtrack
to the day after an election. Some soar, boychoir-friendly.
Calming or Celtic. One’s behind a honeymoon minute, banjo
over Alaskan savannah, panorama cemented by music polishing
views, the sounds-in-my-head syruping over scenery, waking
me to a depth I’d never reach in silence. Song is a more honest
signal than speech. It can’t fake sincerity. It fits me, says “this
is your life,” keys my lock, repeats. Here’s one for an aging,
suburban dad with a headcold, one capturing the suffering of a dog
in a hand-knit hat, one for waltzing around a campfire. Do others
hoard like this? Why does three-four move me more than four-four,
and a five-four slayed me? Are ones loved longer more compelling?
Will my children collect tunes too? Will the ones that make me cry
always make me cry? No, no, and no. And how many more do I get?
When I talk in my sleep and no one answers.
But all day long.
When you pop your clogs
I will get lost buying laces
When you kick the calendar
Mine will be empty
When the garden grows on your chest
I’ll pickaxe spreading ivy
When you leave your feathers
I’ll retrieve them from the hillside like gossip
When you follow the light
Again, I will be afraid of the dark
When you wear wooden pajamas
I will strip for the mirror
When you eat dandelions by the roots
I will inhale the seeds, choking
When you close your umbrella
I will plant its tip in the muddy lawn
But when you bite into grass
Black high heels sink down to you.
When you leave your teeth
I will store them in my sock drawer
When you see the chicories upside down
I flatten blue blossoms in Bibles
And when you kick empty space
I’ll kick empty space forever.
A Note on the Nursing Home Nightstand
--“Here, beloved, hold my breath.”
Thank you world, G.G. wrote, for letting
me skip what scared me most – child gone
missing forever, jailer removing my teeth
one by one, spouse with secret redheaded
twins. Great grandmother’s rickety writing
continued: Thank you for sparing me
colicky baby, food riots, locked-in syndrome,
tsunamis, for shielding me from acid to face.
Thank you, that I never ran over
a boy’s beagle in front of him,
that I likely won’t be discovered,
long-dead, by men wearing haz-mat suits.
Instead you gave me health, ideas,
senses, beloveds and groups of friends:
enhanced brightness as match catches wick.
Each time I drove past the gashed tree
the young drunk driver survived but
his first love did not, and worried
for my children, perhaps that protected us?
Or could I have done what fools did, worn
my helmet unclipped, straps flapping?
I’m heading to the coast of any nowhere.
The Benefits of Listening to a Song Over & Over & Over Again
The places you hear it inhabit the song
the left turn at the top of the hill on the way home from work,
the three-mile stretch with no exits on the interstate,
the bathroom mirror where you watch yourself sing it,
the uphill part of the bike ride where it runs through your head
and they resurface each time you hear it again.
Five years from now you’ll hear it and it will all come back to you
the closet door that wouldn’t close, the crazy family of four
across the street who sat in their car reading after ten, the cat
nestling on your thighs, purring as you worked, the scent
of lip balm, the minutes rolling over on the clock radio
the song carries those ideas wedged between its notes, its rests.
So many creatures praise the over & over again,
dog fetching; bee stepping down foot after foot after foot
along yellow hyssop walls striped by shadow; evaporation;
precipitation, sandpipers tracing surf in an endless Braille;
pulse; inhalation; chanterelles fruiting; trees adding rings; sunset.
Is it only humans who seek variety in all our verbs?
I believe there is a part of us that always loves a person
as much as we loved him when we loved him most.
And the same is true of songs, the adrenaline
of first acquaintance, delight in the mere act of liking,
indelible joy and vigor and rhythm.
What if you could tell she wrote this poem while she had to pee,
would it share a compelling sense of urgency? Could you sense
that no, it’s really being written in a stone house, delicious cool
and a fleece blanket powering it? Maybe a tracker could know,
by the outer pressure on the ball of the poem’s feet, her hot
flash, and how this early love sonnet, written mid-affair,
was visited by a green inchworm landing on the keyboard.
She likes her poems short and approachable, like her men,
she says. She asks, Is all poetry about death and improper
parenting? She says, If you are a careful reader, you will hear
the crows scolding, for an hour, scolding a hawk in the trees
of the poet’s backyard, scolding a hawk eating their one chick,
sinew by sinew. She wrote that long poem with hair in her eyes,
see the impatience? Hear the irritability? Here’s one she started
in the dark of the moon, and this one arrived the day after
L’Oreal Light Ash Brown. Note its syntax of six years younger.
When she wanted to write the best poem of her life, she read a book
by her favorite poet, took a three-hour walk that involved – this is crucial –
ten minutes of being quite lost and five minutes of hypnotic peeling
of her sunburnt left shoulder, then she prepared a last meal for the person
who hadn’t written the best poem of her life yet (think black coffee,
burrata, mango) an hour of headphones, that one song on endless repeat,
then set herself on a quiet car in a commuter train, and began to begin.
Signpost One, Trailhead
Here the great woods reach farthest south, farthest east.
From here, you can reach Alaska, if you can vault a road or two.
This is the bottom reach of the conscience of the continent.
How far do you want to travel?
Signpost Two
The red oaks in this former farmer’s field,
part of the successional growth of the northern woods,
are about 120 years old. Their rings can be seen in the cross-section
of a windfall to your left. If people had rings, wider for growth,
thin and pinched during grief and stagnation,
describe the lines two inches from your heartwood.
Signpost Three
Here you have a fleeting thought, bright as a moth
in a speeding headlight, one that, if written down,
would have formed the perfect coda.
But no.
And if you ever return
it haunts you right here.
A swarm of them buzz silently overhead.
Signpost Four
A few years back, a widow
drew on the surface of this brook
with a stick, drawing hearts
and hieroglyphs for angels to take high.
What do you write on your river?
Signpost Five
See the regal alley here
under the elms lining the old carriage path.
Think of the song, “Going to the chapel
And we’re gonna get maar—aar—aar—ried”
(the Ronettes version, not Beach Boys.)
See how long it takes to remove
the songworm from your brain.
What cures you?
Signpost Six
This is the windiest spot on the path.
In the hammock between the two oaks to your right,
do you feel like a river rock? A fish hook drawn
through air, water and flesh? A warm stillness?
Think for a long, long time. When you awake,
someone should know your answer.
Signpost Seven
Come back
next season.
Signpost Eight
When it rains over this valley,
the mist from the river below rises wide,
splaying rainbows to be seen, or not,
along many tilting sections of this sky.
Who should count them from seven angles?
Signpost Nine
Think of your favorite andante melody,
best beloved second movement,
preferred soundtrack to the closing credits
of the movie that most made you well up.
Music can sink into this view,
waking you to a depth unsounded in silence.
Signpost Ten
Let us leave you with spring peepers
basting sounds to the scene, or butterflies peppering
the lake, road, path and pool, benedictions
flying south. Or here’s a toast to the cold,
with the delight of hardening cider.
Isotopes from the soil help us trace
where they grew, each feather or fruit
or scale. What do they say
about where you came from?
For bonus points, consider,
how do you carry your home forth?
What pulse from there
carries you forward?
Tina Kelley’s Rise Wildly appeared in 2020 from CavanKerry Press, joining Abloom & Awry, Precise, and Washington State Book Award winner The Gospel of Galore. She’s reported for The New York Times, written two nonfiction books, and won a 2023 Finalist award from the NJ State Council on the Arts. She and her husband have two children and live in Maplewood, NJ.
