TRAVEL POEM

 

 

Richard’s new book is called Night Train to Memphis, born out of a sense that life runs in big circles. Having, he says, been eager to shake the dust of Memphis from his feet as a young man, he found himself returning to it, literally and spiritually, now that he’s “old,” as he puts it.. 

 

“The Greek-Alexandrian poet Cavafy elevated his native city, Alexandria, as his model for how he became who he was as a poet; in River Town, I’m attempting to do the same.” 

 

Richard previously wrote this beautiful poem for us.

 

 

 

 

River Town

 

My city came with its own tangle of meanings,

bars and backseats where I

lost my innocence avidly,

gardenias, pure intoxication

when worn by the girl I was in love with.

 

Real and mythical at once,

noisy and demotic 

or “quiet and pure as a peach”

as Adam Zagajewski said,

writing of someplace I’ve never been.

 

Memphis was all of that to me—

a river town with a name strangely Egyptian

but with pool halls and Masonic temples Alexandria

could never have imagined.

Cotilions and columned

Taras built on cotton and bondage,

hacked out of a wilderness primeval and Mississippian

with axes and ruthlessness 

and labor off the slave ship.

 

A gypsy woman on Beale Street

told your fortune for twenty-five cents,

two boys under a sweetgum tree 

played mumbledy-peg with a pocket knife

while a dog looks on.

 

That gypsy woman, that pocket

knife, statues in the park,

the weeds growing up through cracks in the concrete,

percussion of a basketball on city sidewalks.

In the breeze, hickory smoke and pig.

Listen to Phineas Newborn playing the Memphis Blues.

That’s what I’m talking about—

the walk, the weary of it, and then

like church bells from blocks away,

a voice rises up singing.

 

While someone stood over an ironing board

pressing starch into a shirt

and someone had his head under the hood

of a V8 Ford

and someone else was checking a patient’s blood pressure

or selling a piece of real estate,

someone else a few streets away

was composing a melody,

brushing one color next to another,

putting words together to see what they might mean.

I was one of those, I still am.