Trains of
itself to sleep
every night.
Don’t get me wrong.
We cogitate and recogitate all manner
of necessarily complex solutions,
but it’s expensive. It’s expensive and grotesquely
hard to make trains, to make tracks
for trains which can circumvent snoozing civilians.
We talk talk talk. We plan plan plan. And still the trains
gouge out the eyes of the day,
ransack, deplete, and subdue,
sing and swallow,
birth and mourn the future
all through the night.
*
opening onto a wide open mouth
through one long stupified wide open night.
*
If we can cope with
then maybe we can cope
with God. And though God, of course,
cannot ever be outflanked,
I believe just maybe that He
gets distracted. Yeah, you heard me: God can be
beguiled. Temporarily. Maybe. Also time, pain, and death
(God’s little assistants), and
remote and gorgeous, windy, harsh in any season—they can’t be
bamboozled, but we can sweet-talk them down,
momentarily,
here.
*
Momentarily, here,
pain stops. Time stops. Authority
is suddenly canceled.
And the thing is, our bodies
actually vanish as well.
Or that’s what it feels like.
We go “deep down,”
“down deep” we go,
and then we “disappear.”
*
Because in 18 hundred and whatever,
someone built
on this side and also on that side
of the tracks.
Was everything halved
over time? All at once?
What was anyone thinking?
I guess people, like God,
get distracted. And that’s maybe why God
loves his lost children, afterall; his daydreaming children, daydreaming
daydreams exactly like his.
Or rather at the same time.
Or rather in the same place.
*
But the trains roil our patience, don’t they,
all the working day long.
Cars jam up, bumper to bumper at lights,
pedestrians stomp their feet in the cold,
everyone’s late, some turn around
to find the closest bridge over
or the closest bridge under, everybody scrambles
or sits stock still
to stare
at trains slamming past.
Because there’s nothing else to see
and nowhere else to look.
Once it’s happening, it’s happening.
And it’s always happening.
*
Who would want to stop
smack in the middle
of the day?
The crowded and painful day moving,
we’re supposed to move with it.
We’re not allowed
to let up. That’s the deal.
On what authority, I don’t know.
But that’s the deal.
*
Some nights are strangely, relatively quiet.
Some are horrifyingly loud. The whole city, then,
does penance for I don’t know what,
some poor guy at the switch
does penance, some dumb sucker
numb in her bed in a cardboard
apartment several feet from the tracks,
her eyes two big Os and her mouth one big O
and her whole body scoured by silence
as the night travels by
all the trains long.
*
Our whole bodies filled, loud, amost to bursting
with silence. That’s why they scare us
so much, the trains. The
huge.
*
At the height of the humid summer,
air conditioners rumbling
and houses shut all the way up:
you can’t hear the trains. Not much, anyway.
In the terrible depths of the winter,
likewise.
*
I really don’t believe in mystical moments.
Clearly, however, I’m a great fan of talking
about mystical moments. Honest to God, every time,
before I know it I’m blathering
about some dense and transcendent-
non-transcendent event,
and before I know what I’m doing I’ve stopped. Look,
I did it again.
*
It’s just never going to stop. It’s never going to stop.
They’ve got these new horns, amplified astoundingly,
and the law itself dictates so many blasts, at so many intervals,
for such and such a duration, each blast.
Get off the tracks. Get off the tracks.
All that noise and still, every year,
somebody won’t.
Cynthia Nichols 2003 ©