Northbound Trolley
I was stepping into the crosswalk at Town and South Fourth
On the last day of my family-history research vacation,
Near the Greek Revival state house at Broad Street and High
And the statue of Columbus that looked west across the lawn
Until attention to indigenous rights found him in the wrong,
When I flashed back a century. Then it was a weekday afternoon
In June 1925, and I was no longer in front of the Greyhound station
Where I had been planning to board the next bus home to Boston.
I was in front of Central Market instead, no longer carrying
A dog-eared edition of Walt Whitman’s poems, no longer dressed
In t-shirt, jeans, ball cap, and sandals, and no longer eyeing motorists
In big black suburban SUVs with disdain or suspicion.
In red suspenders, sear-sucker trousers, and flat straw hat now,
I watched my fellow citizens go by in a living mural procession.
Butchers and bakers in white hats and aprons, laughter
On their jolly faces, pushed dollies laden with crates and boxes
And wheeled loaded carts through the doors of the pavilion.
The expected Ohio State students headed home for the weekend
Weren’t wheeling their squeaky suitcases and shouldering their heavy
Bags to the bus station, and the usual tranquil Amish children
In blue or black pants and skirts, in white shirts and blouses,
Were not standing with their quiet families at serene attention
Among poor Black migrants from the Mississippi Delta
And poor white migrants from the mountains of Appalachia.
I saw servants and housewives, instead, trailed by knickered children,
Pulling their weekly produce in wheeled carts toward home.
Country people in overalls were arriving in horse-drawn wagons
From farms in Franklin and its adjacent rural counties.
In my buffed white Oxford shoes, I tapped my polished cane
On the limestone curb. I stepped with one of those dapper
Fred Astaire clicks of the heels to the cobblestone pavement.
I waved a copy of that morning’s Columbus Dispatch,
With a headline announcing the signing of a treaty
Of friendship between the United States and Hungary,
At the driver of the northbound trolley clanging up the street
In time for me to pull myself up by a pole and board it.
In the middle of a decade known as much for the patter
Of its popular vaudeville tunes as it is for the flappers
Who danced to those songs on stage—for the speakeasies
And minstrel shows, for the roaring and the laughter—
When permissive popular jazz and restrictive prohibition
Were both in the air, the one existing, it seemed, to counteract
The other, with Calvin Coolidge living in the White House,
Walter Johnson pitching to Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig,
And a newsboy shouting out the signing of that treaty,
I grabbed a leather hanging strap, nodded to fellow passengers,
And hung on tight as the trolley went clanging up the street
On the parallel iron rails. I let that northbound trolley
Just sort of carry me away, while the scenery scrolled by
Like imagery from a movie reel my parents might have seen
At age six or seven at the RKO Palace on a Saturday afternoon,
Not long before Lon Chaney haunted Mary Philbin
In Phantom of the Opera, not long before Charlie Chaplin,
In a shack in The Gold Rush, began to gnaw on his boiled shoe again.
….
Scott Ruescher’s second full-length book, Above the Fold, is scheduled for publication at Finishing Line Press in February 2025. His first one, Waiting for the Light to Change, is still available from Prolific Press. In the last couple years years he has been placing poems in AGNI Online, Negative Capability, Solstice, Common Ground Review, Nine Mile, Pangyrus, the Latin American Literary Review, Poets Against Racism and Hate, and The Lantern(the online magazine of the Colby Museum of Art). He writes publicity for an affordable-housing nonprofit and volunteers in ESOL classes at an adult-education school in the immigrant communities just across the Mystic River from downtown Boston.
The Paddock Review 