Greg Williamson Outbound

Greg Williamson’s poem, “Outbound,” illustrates passengers riding backward on a train moving forwards, images begins with the line,“We passengers ride backward on the train.” This train is presumably moving forwards and the action of being seated backward is shared between all passengers. In the second line, the passengers “train our eyes on what has passed us by.” In the first two lines, Williamson uses "train" as both a noun and a verb, adding a subtle zest to the stanza thus far. Although written in the collective third person, the poem shifts to an indirect first person. The third and fourth lines, “A cobalt blur composes/Into a woman picking roses,” exemplify a shared image even though each passenger would not necessarily be looking at

the same thing. The usage of the word “into” creates an ambiguity that the cobalt blur and the woman can be one collective image or two separate images.

If they were the same image, it would seem that the cobalt was a blur because it was not the focus of the passenger’s sight. If they were two separate images, the cobalt should not have always been a blur but the focus was then on something else, like the “woman picking roses”. If the latter was true, the cobalt in the “hindsight of the eye” becomes vivid as it directly faces the passenger, but only for so long that the woman picking roses becomes vivid as the cobalt blur fades in the direction of the “pane”. This suggests the idea of the “failing hindsight,” the lack of ability to see what has previously occurred. Hindsight can also be defined as previous experiences meaning that the “failing hindsight” could be the idea of past experiences begin forgotten. If the poem does represent sight, it seems implausible that the failing sight would produce such clear

images.
The image of the woman picking roses soon goes away and “A line of oaks comes into focus”.

This line of oak trees is “supplanted by the double-dagger poles/Of power companies”. Because my group and I did not understand the meaning of supplanted, the meaning of the line was puzzling. Even after finding out that supplanted was understood as “replaced,” the line had a sense of ambiguity. The line could describe the trees were being replaced (in this case, molded because the power lines would be made out of wood) by the power lines or a passing image. The next line, “Footnotes that redefine the trees.,” suggests the latter, that the power lines were subtly reiterating the past image of trees, similar to the function of footnotes (explaining or reiterating something above in literature). The next two lines seem to be Williamson’s depictions of what might be a rundown town as he writes, “An asterisk in glass, then window shades,/Graffiti, billboards, tattered banderoles.” The depiction of a rundown town is seen when he describes “an asterisk in glass,” “Graffiti” and “tattered banderoles.” An asterisk in glass suggests a cracked window as tattered banderoles and graffiti suggest worn down decorations and buildings. The aspects of writing (“footnotes” and “asterisk”) don’ explain the landscape by themselves, but when the meaning of the aspects of writing is used, it helps describe what was occurring. For example, the footnotes that redefine the trees suggests that there was more

than meets the eye, that there was something there that isn't currently being seen. The asterisk in glass is more visual, seeing an asterisk as being star-like, a star in a window can either be a reflection of the night time (if it were nighttime, the images would not be seen as clearly) or cracks (the flare of the cracks giving it a star-like shape) in the window. There are two different points of references that are compressed into a single image and the different aspects of scenery and writing are incongruencies only have relation when the meaning behind them both is accounted for.