| The Train I saw a man's face pasted to a train—a gummy mask wedged near the handrail of the locomotive, a purple hat of brain. The iron scissored off his lid and dropped the lifeless body at a crossing. The engineer and brakeman shuffled, sick, among policemen. The coroner couldn't touch the head until investigators came. So there it glared, a mash of eyes and crumpled skin, not thirty graveled feet from the front door of our apartment, where I stood, eating the nightmare of my anger at the dead, who are not horrified. I wanted to pull him back. I wanted to stuff the incontrovertible brainpan back into the shredded membrane of his soul, to remind him back into a world where for example we had that morning picked blackberries beside the track with no exact plans for the next hour and fearless of each other as treasure, a world where no one thinks that by nightfall she will begin to breathe a butchered man through her eyes—a world where the drip and goo of witnessed death prompt lovers after an evening without speaking toward a shuddering twist of clarity, No, never, not you my love not you— where lovers who must yet discover that they are bound forever strain their softest scarves of flesh against each other, where in the sweat and panic of exposure the woman, frantic, whispers, "Talk to me," and hears her lover murmur, "I am talking to you"— a world where innocence wraps a skin of love over death revealing the contours of words that I did not know would heal you, a world where regardless of traffic I believe you will arrive home, a world where regardless of nightmares we are safe, where the oldest legend strides—the daddy who has promised a little thing, a magic squash of pennies, one copper gleam for each plus sweatshine on his forehead and white windshield glare, a gift— who unbalanced over the heat-buffed rail grins back and does not pause annoyed with us and waving to get our attention while the deep whistle expands the neighborhood walls around us, while the day stretches out like a suffocating balloon on the press of the blast horn's not changing: I come now. I come now. It is as if that world never was. It is severed from us and his life sucked out completely by a force that has blown us to the wall and that is breaking our ribs, a force past sight, beyond combat—the children screaming in the car seats— Talk to me, talk to me about this. Back to Poems List |
| The Sun Room |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
 | |  | |  | |  | |  |
 | |  | |  | |  | |  |