100th Volume Retrospective: Racing to the Coast by Leslie Gottesman

Today’s poem was written by Leslie Gottesman, who went on to become a professor of English at Golden Gate University.


Racing to the Coast

by Leslie Gottesman

 

The face fragments stumble past the sleep station

The children are stamping to get to the home station

We place the morning station

carefully in the locked Japanese hotel “collection”

machine station, it emerges in an instant

coffee station. The trance begs the window station

for a commercial. The baseball players are

involved in a revolution at the shaving station

You get up to leave the room station, I

believe, but disappear into the waiting station station

I am alone in the green station, it is the lamp

station to be broken. At the same time, the stations

whiz past the windows. There are some

stations to which we arrive, the arm station, the leg

station. I am making a station collection station

upon this small brown hill, behind the station, waiting

for your blue postcard from the foreign places station

 

from Vol. 46 (1965)