A ghost train just passed through me like a magician’s saw
Bursting my favorite reveries into one
Endless reality. I didn’t mind.
I could idle here forever in my car, straddling
These wrist-thin train tracks, decades defunct.
Before and after and beside me, other drivers
Wait for the traffic light that will mean we can inch and creep.
I spend more hours a week with them, and a cart-pushing Tibetan, and those three
Natives picnicking under the overpass with malt liquor and sunflower seeds,
Than I do with good friends.
Sometimes when particularly gridlocked, there’s time to step out
And root around through all the other limbs and severed incarnations
On the asphalt; all the years of office windows
Smeared horrifically right up against your sleep.
Eventually, though, the light
Turns to green enough times and the traffic
Herd rumbles forward into a world
No one has figured out yet how to love any better for more cash or a faster phone.
But it’s there; you can smell it beneath the axle-grease heat of summer and drone of
galvanized surf,
Where once bison blinked patiently to cross back home.
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Used by permission from Mitochondrial Night (Coffee House Press, 2019). Copyright © 2019 by Ed Bok Lee.
Ed Bok Lee
Ed Bok Lee is the author of Whorled (Coffee House Press) and a recipient of a 2012 American Book Award and the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. Lee is the son of North and South Korean emigrants—his mother originally a refugee from what is now North Korea and his father raised during the Japanese colonial period and Korean War in what is now South Korea. Lee grew up in South Korea, North Dakota, and Minnesota and was educated there and later on both U.S. coasts and in Russia, South Korea, and Kazakhstan. He teaches at Metropolitan State University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Other honors include the Asian American Literary Award (Members’ Choice Award) and a PEN Open Book Award.
