Commuter Train

by Robert Haynes

Sometimes I can’t help wanting other commuters
to think I’m shining into the foliar flush
where robins nest in the knuckle of a tree.
I wear the tweed jacket with elbow patches
ready to debate an essay. Oh sure, it’s just theater;
I’m just another nobody who rides the veins
of 30th Street with the ghost of a classroom.

I have just enough time to down a cocktail
as the landscape blurs with the train’s rhythmic
rattle from the university where my fellow
professors drone on about supply chains,
oeuvres of data, metaphors dissected like carburetors.
Even when rehearsed, my academic speak
softens with small-talk in the club car.

I’m grading papers and doling out gold stars
for little effort, believing the hands on the clock
have counted for more than wasted time and busy work.
I look at the feral hounds out the window
rummage through the refuse gliding past…and low
in the east, a murmuration of starlings morphs
into a living cloud blending bedlam into grace.

Robert Haynes lives in Seneca Falls, New York. His poems have appeared in North American Review, Nimrod, New Letters, Poetry Northwest, Rattle, Bellingham Review, Lake Effect, Poet Lore, Cimarron Review, Natural Bridge, Louisville Review, and Louisiana Literature, as well as featured on the Verse Daily website. His poems have also been reprinted in anthologies Cabin Fever (Word Words) and Kansas City Out Loud (BkMk Press), and in the poetry textbook Important Words (Boynton/Cook Heinemann). Haynes latest book is The Grand Unified Theory (Kansas City: Paladin Contemporaries). He currently teaches online writing and visual rhetoric and poetry workshops at Arizona State University.