Oh, another poem, in a way another poem about a child
is called Cross Ties.
You know, sometimes when you start writing a poem,
a little bit of it will come to you.
Sometimes the beginning, but not always.
And that was the way this one went.
But the first couple of lines came to mind easily.
It looked like it wanted to go on someplace.
And I knew what these first two lines were about.
They were a memory from a childhood in New Jersey of when
I used to walk to town.
And the shortest way to walk to town
was over an abandoned, eerie railroad track.
Nothing had passed along this track for maybe 20 years.
And yet every time I walked that track
I kept thinking of what my mother and father had told me,
don't walk on railroad tracks.
A train might come along.
And I knew no train was going to come along, but just the same,
I couldn't help sometimes looking over my shoulder
throwing a fearful glance back to see
whether by chance a train might be running.
And these lines went: out walking ties left over
from a track where nothing travels now but rust and grass.
Having got those lines down on paper,
I said, well, where do we go from here?
But this looked like the first leg of a metaphor, you know.
It looked like something to compare to something else.
But what?
I thought and thought.
I thought, well, what is this experience
of looking for a train that isn't there like?
Then the devil arose and tempted me
to write a significant and important poem.
It said, ah, ha ha, aha, Kennedy, this is obviously
like living in this atomic age, not
knowing when a Holocaust might come.
So I tried to push the poem ahead.
But every time I try to push a poem ahead under my own steam,
it doesn't end up a poem but ends up a zombie.
So I couldn't get any place with that.
So I retired the poem to my dresser drawer
and forgot about it for two years.
In the meantime, a big event happened.
My wife and I had our first child, a little girl.
And promptly, we fell into a controversy between ourselves.
By that time, I was a fallen away
Catholic and my wife, a fallen away Protestant.
And we thought, should we get the baby baptized?
My Catholic training suggested that, yes, we'd better
get this baby baptized.
Or what if the baby dies just because we
withheld this simple sacrament?
Then the baby will go to limbo, that
place where the unhappy, baptized infants go.
Dante gives us a tour through it, a quick tour.
And so, we don't know what to do.
It seemed to me that to get Kathleen baptized
would be hypocritical.
So we were at loggerheads until we were visiting
my wife's family in Milwaukee.
They are a bunch of Germans who love their beer and bratwurst.
They love to throw parties on any occasion.
Somebody said, well, why don't we get Kathleen baptized?
We'll call the minister over and we'll make an event,
call all the local relatives.
And both my wife and me, together, we
said, Oh, yes, yes, yes, let's do it.
What an idea.
So the minister was called, Kathleen was baptized,
and we felt greatly relieved.
Not long after that, in one of those dry periods where
you just tool over your old unfinished fragments that
haven't gone any place, hoping one of them
will come alive again, I came across the first two lines
once more about the train I was looking
for that I knew wasn't there, but which somehow I
feared anyway.
And so the poem went on.
This is Cross Ties.
Out walking ties left over from a track where nothing travels
now but rust and grass, I could take stock
in something that would pass, bearing down
hell bent from behind my back.
A thing to sidestep or go down before.
Far off, indifferent as that, curfews
wail that the evening wind flings like a sack of mail.
Or close up as the moon whose head
beam stirs a flock of cloud to make tracks.
Down to strafe bristlebacked grass, a hawk falls.
There's a screech like steel wrenched taut
till severed, out of reach or else beneath desiring.
I go safe, walk on, tensed for a leap,
unreconciled to a dark void, all kindness.
When I smell the salt, I throw the devil some
and still I let them sprinkle water on my child.