FOREWORD

At times, poems can show us how to live, or at least point in the direction of what might be possible. How do we live in Kai Carlson-Wee’s poems? We shoplift. We share. We skateboard. We skitch. We pass bottles of something back and forth, but do not drink from them—we inhale whatever it is that’s inside. In “Dundas,” a poem found near the end of this journey, the poet offers this: “. . . if God were enough, we keep / saying, but it’s not . . .” Desperation drives many toward a low-level spirituality, yet here there is a refusal to accept easy consolation, especially in the unseen. We return to what can be slept upon—Rust. Lions. Trains. An old spirit named Cloudmaker is threaded throughout. Hobo, sage, trickster, he offers a way out. “This life, he tells me, / is one of those fake plastic rocks in the garden / you break with a hammer to get out / the key.”

The poems in Rail are inhabited by drifters, the generation that lingers in the downtowns of any American city, now with skateboards, now with earbuds, occasionally fucked up, hypervigilant to both beauty and danger, lost in an endless, epic, American nowhere. Here we are, riding the rails. Here we are, in train yards and hobo camps. Here we are, sensing, once again, how nothing can hold us, encountering, as Wallace Stevens wrote, the “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

Like dark matter, that mysterious celestial substance, our speaker shimmers in the void, making a life for himself from little. Twenty-something, no parents in sight, no job, reeling from depression, he moves through the margins with only the myth of America and the stories of the past to guide him. There is a brother, but he is heartbroken. There are friends, but they are overdosing on heroin. There is a war, but it is the shadow of war. How do we come to terms with the epidemics of our culture? You won’t find the answer here, just the effect, the husks, scattered across the heartland.

Everywhere we go in these poems we struggle to gather what’s been left behind, what’s been carried home. Home, though, is a complicated concept here. Here it is more a lack of anywhere to go, any alternative. This is a book steeped in location, but the location is diffuse. I wake somewhere on the outskirts of Portland. The cities in this book are the second cities . . . we aren’t in Manhattan, we are in Fargo. We aren’t in Los Angeles, we’re in Flagstaff, places where “the killer was soon forgotten.” In the poem “American Freight,” which is epic, biblical, the poet offers this: “You forget your body / has form. Half in dream, half out.” “American Freight” ends with the line, “It carries us home,” but I sense it is, unlike for Ulysses, not from where he came. This home is something he has had to create, which is forever just beyond his grasp.

“Jesse James Days” is another watershed poem. It’s a poem that seems to have come from somewhere outside of Carlson-Wee—I can imagine him staring at it, as I do, wondering at the old soul who created it. There is, again, that unsettling search for what is authentic, for what is a genuine feeling. “And what do we feel now, / watching the years float slowly by, as if in the skin / of another man?” This poem seems to capture that moment one turns briefly to look at oneself and finds someone unrecognizable: “. . . how we erase ourselves / knowingly, hands outstretched to the sound of it passing us, / letting the riders ride in.” The ghosts of Frank Stanford, of Lynda Hull, of Sam Shepard, of Larry Levis haunt these poems, as well as something older. Maybe Woody Guthrie, maybe Walt Whitman (another war poet), if he hadn’t found a spiritual home in the possibility of America. That possibility, that hope, may be long dead, but still there is something compelling here, something, as Whitman says, “with original energy.”

Rust. Lions. Trains. This is the original energy that weaves throughout this fine, troubling, familiar book. Sketched out of dreams and quiet desperation, a search for the authentic banging against a sense of the forever receding past. Rail is timely, but also timeless. It shows us where we’ve been, but it also shows us where we might be going. If I were to put a book on a spaceship to show the aliens what it is like at this moment in America, this would be one of the books I’d choose. The aliens, though, would already know everything, they would see what is invisible and everywhere at once—in skateparks and alleyways, where poets and nomads, old and young, search “. . . for anything / other than home.”

—Nick Flynn

October 2017