RIDING THE RAIL
RIDING THE RAILS
When the chock-a-block, cheek-to-jowl leaked from my life I was left with a do-it-yourself kit. The directions were imbedded in the inseparable conjunction of the parts.
Ice boats, astronomy, and railroads; the rest was lost.
This continent is laced with abandoned railroad tracks. These railroads were built differently than the later adventures in eminent domain and manifest destiny. People were pulled from their separate beds into a night humming like a big bell. They were called to follow the resonance to its source. No railroad had been built, but that’s what drew them into the soul of the sleeping land.
It had thrown the covers from my bed since childhood. The long whistle, a window and the moonlight outside.
I dug out old surveyor maps from archives in land grant colleges. They could point me to these forgotten lines, and from them branched others, some pirated, some bribed for, some persuaded or seduced, lines aimed towards flanking hills, blue or green on the horizon
These maps all marked failures. If these lines had succeeded they led to New York or Los Angeles. These were still quiet enough to hear while sleeping.
I built my boat on such a rail line. I scavenged the wheels from dilapidated boxcars, planted them on the tracks and built on top. No need for sea worthiness, but I built it carefully with an eye towards the subtle substance it would ply. My bed had carried me in my first dreams; that went into my workmanship.
Companionable geniuses junket about with a boy. Most squint up inside the single life he leads. In other lives they might have walked beside him and yarned around the cooking pot. Mine resisted civilizing especially having my ears cleaned. They called me outdoors. I could bound over river rocks faster than anyone and launch a stone into ever smaller hops until it nested on a pond and reflection would smooth its dander and settle around it. Mine were a scruffy crew who preferred scamper and scrabble and the quiet that mortared between them. They tutored my hand to their liking and use, following echoes.
I completed her in the merry month of May, stocked her and stretched sail. I’d oiled the wheels to a fare-thee-well and glided along barely chipping the quiet. Many a critter’s dainty introversion I trespassed, all sharp attention pawned for an idyll. Cub and fawn bobbed at flowers, the springy stalk a teasing tether to a vision completed in its utterance. I came on couples in their nuptials and would have excused myself, but wolves, deer, bear and wolverine had no miser left in them, but overflowed and raced beside my boat, and birds hitched a ride without their remembered hauteur but in a way I took as all of us were equally aloft-a coincidence in purpose steadily and gently appraised.
I picked up wayfarers. They kept their own counsel and gave little in conversation for passage. I named them as I guessed them, vagabond, refugee, migrant, fugitive, pilgrim. Birds of a feather flock together, I thought, and wondered at the iron coursing in the currents I rode. Charon’s temperance worried at me, the drier hemming to peace. What are his cargo, these shades? What fining, distillation prepared them, and what reconciliation that king or slave in umber realms can tender only coin for passage, the rest chaff to the boatman.
I gnawed on this as the passengers I took thinned in substance with the miles rode. The gull that landed on my craft fair alone raised the jib on my prow. A cold eye he cast, our speed gaining. I saw in his stare a shearing from the long winds, what a carpenter’s plane may peel from a beam, rind but pith, too. Swift upon distance he took us until spreading his honed wings he lifted from the bow and held pace until veering and swept to a climb.
On the clear, moonless night when the stars crowded in and not a breeze, a snowshoe hare and snowy owl kept détente on my still boat. So still, I heard falling starlight and was there to catch the moment that single thimble spilled a light’s life away and it was seized into dew and foundering flake. And the hare looked into my eye and I heard the moon’s sheer train sliding over the deep.
That the clear heart of light might be empty put sorrow to all routes.
She waved me down and I reefed mainsail to bid her passage. Dressed for the city but would serve for the road, garbed with a low-heeled shoe, brass buckle and broad toed, near glamour in stern times and mile-worthy in a pinch. Her coat for fog through to sleet and the smaller snows have lost their down and pelt salty sting on their empty fall.
Sympathy, even charity not haggard in her weary face, and ardor never once supple, her chin set for the arduous, leading to breast every blow, her eyes bruised though only by tears, and true and sharp without wile. I knew her at once she climbed aboard in workmanlike fashion and took my assisting hand in a comradely grip. She’d clambered aboard many times before and cobbled the gangways from crates and wire spools, and fashioned gowns from wool socks and newsprint glued with spit. A tin spoon and plate had fed multitudes, and I recognized her even had she never leaned against the mast, steady as the pole, the moon a lamplight on its foremost height. Lilly of the Lamplight for the ready answer to every query spoken, growled, or cursed. She’d opened her coat in the teeth of a gale, lashed to the mast by every soldier’s siren, and fixed on one leg, the other around their waist, dispensed the lyric verse for less than Charon’s fare.
I rode the rails and found myself at a common speed with music. There light dons lightness to gain its senses, the song begins and light girds its loins to enter the moment.
Green boy abed, light bobbin, that long song was a round, call and echo, that bid you passage.
I rode the rails, grim and gothic, girdling this gathering of longing that troughed emptiness so starlight pours in. fit to burst, such is the tuning, ripe to bloom, hardly checked and sweet unfolding, this fruit and flower, perishing, opened past chance to close, the song from red silence is tears indistinguishable of grief and joy.
