Planetary Stories Project

"To Act Globally, Think Locally – Through Stories"

Black Earth Institute

Place: Detroit, MI, USA

Train from Detroit
By Judith Roche

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Train from Detroit

From a fort called Ponchartrain
The City of Detroit became,
my fourth-grade-first-written poem,
for my city’s 250 year birthday.
Day-twa, City of the Straits,
water road between two large lakes,
road for those long lake freighters.
Only place in the US where you go south,
by tunnel or bridge, to get to Canada.

Slow travel past boarded windows, broken
green glass, grimed towers, rounded
stone and old brick smoke stacks,
dumped tires beside slow train tracks,
sumac and goldenrod poke through trackside soot,

In a large playfield attached to a school,
burned weeds and barbed wire on low buildings.
six cop cars swarm two men in handcuffs,
The men could be my long-gone uncles
or my absent and unborn brothers.
The cops, replicas of an evil uncle-in-law
my mother told bad stories about.
A Detroit cop, he handcuffed a Black man behind
and pushed him face-first down the stairs.
These things happened. This was Detroit.
The uncle listened, rapturous, to soaring opera on the radio–
passion that would have embarrassed
my Appalachian uncles or French Canadian father–
a passion I aspired to in my life,
so I believed him a finer cut than the rest,
until my mother’s story. 

Scud-gray sky hangs heavy out of the city
as we pick up speed. Smoke stacks morph
into blue aluminum siding of the closed Cadillac plant.
Now a neighborhood, newer brick, more trees,
now the Dearborn Ford plant, shiny glass box,
now downriver dead car and truck graveyards,
trailer parks and trashy houses,

with wheeling birds sweeping circles overhead,
becoming fallow fields ringed by tall poplar borders,
our double track suddenly blossoming to a wide switchyard
with braided tracks woven into acres of steel mesh.

Past the Ypsilanti Ford Plant, where my sister once worked,
we cross a machine-cut lake,
red leaves settle into a flat black surface,
pool off the Huron River into Ann Arbor.
Now a riverbank of russet red-browns,
gold and ochre leaves beyond the river,
the track’s straight lines cris-cross
the curvy river for miles out of Ann Arbor,
past places where my young husband
and I kissed, before babies, before
years of blood under the bridge.
My heart so full here,
I overflow my cornerstones.

Some trees already bare but surrounded
with a red-gold halo on the ground,
a circle skirt stripped by a rough lover,
a perfect shape of naked limbs above,
How things become so colorful just before they die.

Red barns of rural Michigan anchor
corn flying past in such perfect narrow rows
the field appears animated and marching along
in a kind of bouncy cartoon form–
life imitating a flipbook–
it goes so fast.