Sunday Poem

Subways in Europe

I  ride out into nowhere on the Paris blue line
because  it is Paris after all, and riding is being
anywhere  else but home on a bus out West.
There  are people who think riding the subways
of  Europe is only a way to get around, to work
or  the theater, to a bookstore, or some place
like  a destination, with a purpose, a goal. But
I  ride for the pleasure of the displacement,
distance  grows in me like a nervous worm. 
No  one rides the subways here just for the ride. 
They  believe in destiny. I ride through factory towns
on  the outskirts of cities, through neighborhoods
where  the incomprehensible graffiti screams, words
whipped  up out of a maelstrom of urban languages,
ride  through subsistence gardens planted along tracks
that  feed those who cannot ride the subways
for  pleasure.  It is a time machine, this  subway,
journeying  back into the world’s fine, forgotten
ancestry.  It’s a spider that feeds on my desire
for  the oldest forms of communion.
.

by George Moore
from Drafthorse, Winter 2012