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 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
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 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 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
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.
Nichols © 2003
Draft posted for temporary viewing.