En Route

Mary Ruefle

First published in Salt Hill 31 (2013).

On the train with my mother
as soon as it got dark
she turned the light on and
I could see myself perfectly
in the dark glass and I was
startled as I had not much
experience in looking
I noticed my mother barely
glanced at herself and I got
the feeling down pat people
didn’t have to look or
maybe they didn’t want to
The lady in front of us
had a fur over her shoulder
a little fox with a head
and a tail and two glass beads
embedded where its eyes
would have been
It seemed to comfort her
I thought it was her pet
as I was my mother’s
Then the glass eyes of
the animal—fashionable pelt
of the day—met mine and I heard
us—speaking—when my mother
reached up and turned off the light
and I saw the dark hills
and the bare trees and the
tiny innumerable lights
of tiny innumerable towns
while eating a sandwich
without a single scrap
of damp lettuce at the bottom
which had it been there
I would have offered to the fox
or thrown out the window

Mary Ruefle is the author of My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has published ten books of poetry, a book of prose (The Most of It, 2008), and a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed!, (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007); she is also an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries, and published in A Little White Shadow (2006). She lives in Bennington, Vermont.