Ned Balbo

Passengers in Payne’s Gray

Amtrak, Northeast Corridor: through glass,
what colors are impatient to be gone?
We pass the Payne’s gray of the water’s surface,

unstoppable between stops, instantly
perceived and lost. The rumble and the tremble
carry us like decorated glass

about to break. Bridgeless, the bridge supports
we pass, gulls dozing, whirl and glide away,
planted with scrub trees. Now the water’s surface

scatters in Payne’s gray flecks of memory…
Horizon and sky are one, a vanishing
that’s no one’s fault, or ours, like blue-gray glass

that casts its glow of iron or indigo—
We’re going, going, gone, like watercolors
stanched with rags, or bread, the river’s surface

panning right, blues leaning black or gray,
cobalt or coal… Where do we start, or end,
riding the Northeast Corridor, under glass,

where pain’s gray, like the speeding water’s surface?

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Ned Balbo’s newest books are The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots (New Criterion Poetry Prize) and 3 Nights of the Perseids (Richard Wilbur Award), both published in 2019. His previous books are Upcycling Paumanok, Lives of the Sleepers (Ernest Sandeen Prize), Galileo’s Banquet (Towson University Prize) and The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems (Poets’ Prize and the Donald Justice Prize). He received a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship and three Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland Arts Council. Recent poems appear in Birmingham Poetry Review, Ecotone, Literary Matters, Literary Imagination and Gingko Prize 2019 Ecopoetry Anthology. Balbo taught most recently in Iowa State’s MFA program in creative writing and environment and at the West Chester University Poetry Conference. He is married to poet-essayist Jane Satterfield. (More at https://nedbalbo.com.)