Kelle Groom

Alice Takes the Train

In Boston
Not like anything
Alice had ever known
She got around
By car on George
Jetson-like speedways
Swooping in eights
Or sleepy beach
Streets with one or two
Stoplights for the whole town
In Dorchester she was surprised
First by the descent
Into a cement underworld
Then the screech
Of machinery steel
On steel cratcheting
Toward her out of darkness
Like one long scream
The incontestable zip
Of glass doors closing
Like a sideways guillotine
The people crammed
Together upright
Matches in a box
At her waist more
Faces staring at buttons
The strap she grabbed
Overhead like a hand
About to lift her up
And the merry-go-round
Silver pole she fell against with
Each stop start
Her feet unable to gain
Footing bodies a buffer
Against falling
She tried to look in everyone’s
Eyes but they all
Looked down as if
Deep in thought which
She imagines they were
Alice thought
If we had trains
In Florida everyone
Would be saying hey
Giving directions
Saying I like your hair
Your shoes your dress
Your lipstick your nails
Your eyeliner Could you
Show me how you get it
To look like that?
But after a mostly
Gray ice slosh winter
Riding the T her eyes were
Down too a privacy
They gave each other
In the crush like an invisible
Phone booth where she
Called people in the past
And when she departed
On the train for the airport
Her suitcase
Rolled uncontrollably
Until a stranger’s knees caught it.

Alice Holding a Balance, 1664

She’d been turned around in the museum—
sunlight ran diagonal
on eyes folded down like a sheet.
Gold scale delicate as eyeglasses
held between two fingers, her body curves
beneath a coat, but women then
had a pregnant look, swaybacked, weighted,
the archangel behind her head
weighs souls. The soul of Vermeer
still here (if not, what is that light?) in Dublin
where the woman writes a letter
with her maid, twice stolen by the IRA
and then the underworld, seven years
to get it back, the security guard
who pointed Alice in her direction said,
You’re a good girl,
the judgment of a stranger in a uniform
directing her upstairs to a woman
writing for three hundred years,
answering the red waxed message,
sunlight always pouring in, vanishing
in the woman’s eyes, pouring like
the finding of Moses behind them,
in a room where nothing can be recited
to magically undo the part we are to play.

Alice on the Costa Del Sol

Anita, her alter ego, parallel self, name given
to her at sixteen in a classroom at David Glasgow

Farragut High School on the coast of Spain, a school
named for the first Admiral of the Navy born

in Tennessee; his father Jorge was from the island
of Minorca, so she studies under his son’s name, under

the name of Anita, the walnut click of each teeth-baring syllable.
In the Civil War, Farragut lashed trees to the masts of his ship,

the Hartford, covered the hull in Mississippi mud to convince
the enemy he was just a forest on the other shore;

David not his first name either—he was born James,
but his family rescued a man knocked out on a drifting ship

and though the man died, his son, in gratitude for care,
adopted James and gave him his own name, David, and took him

out to sea. Spain had been one of three choices for Alice’s family,
Scotland another, Glasgow, but they’d had enough of cold,

so she is named Anita in a Spanish-language classroom
where most of the students already speak Spanish—

an easy class for them, but not for Anita, in the back row,
who cannot tell what day it is, her age, where she is from,

until finally, the teacher who baptized her Anita,
grows impatient with her silent as a tree,

demands she translate a simple word, father, father,
one word repeated and bouncing off her wooden desk

like arrows that won’t stick, or Farrugut’s flagship,
the Hartford, hit 240 times by enemy fire, the entire class

angling for a better view, transfixed by Anita who doesn’t
seem to recognize her own name, longing for Scotland,

a moor and kilt, a singing language where words
are always a little stuck in the throat, reluctant to leave.

Alice & the Beehives

Alice wanted to climb stone steps
into the eighth century,
seven hundred feet straight up,

despite vertigo
bad as the child’s who fell
to his knees climbing

three stories, air so heavy
he had to carry it on his back.
But George Bernard Shaw

said the island was everywhere
and nowhere at the same time,
and that’s where Alice wanted to be.

As she arrived on the coast, a man
stepped back to take a photograph
and fell into the sea,

even the children of the lighthouse
slipped away. Penitents came too,
but first the monks built beehives

out of stone, silence like Elijah
in the cave all day long:
wandering green martyrdom,

the otherworld visible if you stand
on the rock that turns, and you
find yourself suspended in the air.

Alice Takes a Little Walk

One night, the tide’s too high,
so Alice climbs the white corner of a condo
pressed against the sea,
walks the edge like a diving board
and wants to dive like the guy at Niagara
with crackling ions
like tiny stars on his skin, wet kisses
inviting him to fall in
with the rest of the water.
She jumps when a man approaches
from behind on the condo-side
with a short glass of amber
half-drunk, and a cigarette, setting
his drink down on the wooden
railing as if it is a bar,
and in the quiet that follows says,
I hope you don’t mind, but you looked
so beautiful, and you still look
beautiful, his wedding
ring thick and gold on his hand
held to his face, like a talisman
to hypnotize, as if he thinks
he can just look down on Alice,
and she’ll lift her head, transfixed.

Kelle Groom is the author of four poetry collections, Underwater City, Luckily, Five Kingdoms, and Spill; a memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl, a B&N Discover selection and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice; and most recently, How to Live: A Memoir in Essays. An NEA Fellow, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow, and winner of two Florida Book Awards in poetry, Groom’s poems appear in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry.