KIM ADDONIZIO
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Listen to Kim Addonizio on Trance•Cast
Kansas, 4:00 A.M.​​
The train brakes to take the bend behind the grain mill.
All night, at the motel, you listen to the ice machine’s cold labor.
Does it ever stop?
Thunk. No, says the vending machine as the next train goes by.
On the highway, the big rigs whine,
some carrying things that would kill you if one jackknifed off the overpass.
The chicken truck passes with its load of small-brained misery.
You can’t hear the chickens, but you sort of think you can,
the way you can almost hear the sounds of the bar car on the train—
the bleary passengers trapped in their windows,
peering through their doppelgängers at the black
fields of wheat as they whiz past.
Childhood, did it ever exist?
What about the bar your father drank in, giving you
endless quarters for pinball . . . There it goes,
carried aloft by a maniacal wind.
Before science, a lot of wind gods
blew things around. The dead went to live on the moon.
A man might be half scorpion, a woman half fish.
An omniscient, omnipotent stranger who looked
like Santa Claus and had a throne in outer space
knew everything about you, yet still somehow loved you unreasonably.
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Another chunk of ice clunks into the bin.
Under your window, an insect in the bushes scrapes out its longing.
The sounds of the world at this late hour sadden you,
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but then enters the rain, hastening down, the rain that wants
to touch everything
and almost does.
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Kim Addonizio is the author of nine poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry, The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. She has received fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundation, Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and the essay, and her work has been widely translated and anthologized. Tell Me was a National Book Award Finalist in poetry. Her new poetry collection, Exit Opera, is out from W.W. Norton. She lives in Oakland, California. "Kansas, 4 A.M." appears in her latest book, Exit Opera, and is republished here with her permission.
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