Trains of Fargo

Fargo is the city that screams

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.

*

Fargo’s a wide open mouth

opening onto a wide open mouth

through one long stupified wide open night.

*

If we can cope with Fargo,

then doubtless 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 Fargo, North Dakota—

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 Fargo

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 at least at the same time.

Or at least 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 wants to stop, after all,

smack in the middle

of the pulsing 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 Fargo night is

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.