It's Tuesday, and I began as I almost always do on a Tuesday, reading Dave Bonta's Poetry Blog Digest, which almost always takes me in interesting directions. This morning, it's been a bit of a trip down memory lane, courtesy of Shawna LeMay's blog post which mentioned Bruce Springsteen's "Downbound Train."
She quoted lyrics, which I didn't remember from the song:
"Now I work down at the car washWhere all it ever does is rain
Don't you feel like you're a rider
On a downbound train?"
So of course, I went in search of the song, which instantly catapulted me back to the fall of 1984, when the album Born in the USA came out. I bought it at Wal-Mart, along with a fan for my dorm room. A few weeks later, my boyfriend went back to Memphis where his mom needed him. He'd been wearing my DC101 (a rock radio station) jacket that my sister had won somehow and given to me. That jacket smelled of sweat and the Players cigarettes that he smoked, and I wore it all fall, feeling sad as my smells replaced his.
It was a different time, the results of a different election, daylight in America, brutal regimes across the globe, and when people wonder why I'm not as hopeless in 2026 as I might be, it's because I remember past time when I couldn't imagine how humanity would survive--and here we are, surviving this history that is not repeating but rhyming, a slant rhyme, to be sure, or maybe just a history so full of allusions that it's hard to read.
I wrote so many letters in the fall of 1984, actual letters on paper, back when long distance phone calls were expensive, and the only phone I had was the one at the end of my dorm hallway, where those of us with long distance relationships talked to distant loves. My half of the correspondence filled a dresser drawer. My boyfriend's letters took up a shoe box.
I married him anyway. And now, here we are, decades later. On Sunday we watched some PBS presentation on the American experiment, featuring Ken Burns talking about his documentaries. It was fairly recent with the focus on the Revolution in 1776, and my spouse bleakly said, "It's all over." I think he meant the grand experiment of freedom, and I said, "No, it's not." I was talking about the American experiment of revolution and self-governance, with piercing awareness of all the ways that the foundational documents of the USA have not borne fruit--and all the ways they have.
We were well into the second bottle of wine on Sunday, so we didn't discuss further. But it's a conversation we've been having since 1983 when we first met, so we didn't really need words.
This morning, some lines came to me, as I've been reading and writing:
We are half drunk with disappointment,
fueled by sundrenched picnics and longing,
and you declare the great experiment
dead, and I say no.
Schooled on Springsteen
and Woody Guthrie,
and the songs of enslaved people,
I know that times have always been hard.
I've begun the poem, but I don't know where it leads--like so many elements in my life. The YouTube algorithm has given me delightful songs from the Springsteen starting point. It's been a delightful morning, as Tuesdays so often are, rooted in the words (and rabbit holes) of others.
