The D Train
Photo by Ales Krivec on Unsplash
The wrong side of the tracks.
They call it the D-train, the one
they don’t write songs about,
to somewhere
But nowhere fast like books
To which she ran and hid
Like a dog-eared boxcar
Piled high with wonders
not coal nor steel nor other things
That other worlds are built upon.
Books go somewhere
But, honestly, nowhere fast.
An imagined life somewhere,
somewhere else
like a train destination
Imagined til the last car
Dissipates from view like a dream,
From sound like a memory
that might mean something, then again...
close the book, dream again
dream again remember
oh he was handsome. Sinatra
Handsome, A-train handsome, this man
a train to a town called Safe.
And she was. Safe.
She never left. And still the books,
those dog-eared boxcars
A pile a week from the local library,
A place called Safe in this town called Safe.
No one called.
No one stopped by.
No one asked how are you
in this Town called Safe.
Eighty Five years.
This town called Safe
Is now a memory serenely
Vanishing like a train to somewhere,
Dog-eared like a boney boxcar.
Dented about the edges,
Rusted into sharp and ragged holes,
The battered steel that held the mind
Sifts the disintegrating dust
Of childhood rape here, the dust of lonely there,
The dust of regret and I guess this is it,
scattered everywhere on an
industrial rug in a Safe place
where people go to die.
Oreck gathers the dropped thoughts
Of this life spent waiting on the wrong
side of the tracks for the D-train
that never stopped.
The handsome man mourns. Workers
Swirl, swivel, swoosh, and suck
the disintegrating particulate of
My mother’s mind.
It is my turn to hold my mother’s
regrets, fears, pains, longings.
I know things, and I’m angry,
Until my memory sifts onto
An industrial rug, freeing us both
From all that arrived and left.