As always, I walk the ties, trying to
syncopate my step to their awkward
interval. It’s hot. At some age, six or eight,
the distance matches the length of your leg exactly,
you can march to town in two-four time. Now
Cow Vetch and Mustard get in the way
and hide the ties. “Sleepers.” Watch your step.
A Goldfinch lands on a rail, then a White-tail Dragonfly,
its pause a half-beat between darts. The heat
is tired in its bones, exhausted by absent thunder
like a couple trying to get pregnant, dragging their sad
much-discussed ass to bed.
Back in Moderns, Dr. Reaney led us
into Yoknapatawpha County. He had been there. “Remember
it is hot; stick all that past in a pot
and set it on the stove.” Bindweed and Wild Grape
curl around the rails, tendrils, tentacles, the tracks
in the distance with their old
Parkinsonian shake. Around my head
the comic-book sign for dizziness is being etched
by deerflies. Quentin Compson
hungers for his sister, who will later bear a daughter,
also Quentin, who will steal the cash,
her own, from her ordinary, evil
uncle, and run off with the red-tied carny-man. Hawkweed
and Daisies
sharpen their hardihood on gravel. The spikes,
once hammered like cold bolts from the blue,
a wobbly tooth. We loved the old train, really, it
would take an afternoon’s mosquito and cicada hum,
pre-amplify it, put a big bass underneath, we’d feel it
in the air the way, I guess, a horse can sense an earthquake
coming, we’d
drop everything – berry pails, books – and run down
to the tracks, Luke in manic overdrive because
June was busting out all over and we’d all turned dog. We’d stand
throbbing in its aura, waving; the blunt-faced locomotive,
a few tanker cars full of polysyllabic stuff,
the caboose with maybe a reciprocating wave, the throb
thinning to the whine of iron wheels on iron rails.
To be next door to violence, that dreadful
blundering. It was fun. It was cathartic. Now it’s like
single-point perspective had let go, shattering into the tip
tilt hop of the Yellow warbler’s pointillist attention
in the Rock elm. So much intricate
tenacity. Milkweed with its lavish
muted blooms, the milk that feeds the larvae
of Monarch butterflies and makes them
poisonous to birds. When the train ran over Luke
it was too dumb to pause or blow its whistle, probably
never saw him there between the tracks or heard us
shouting into the electric deafness of the moment.
Well. That spot is occupied by Bladder campion now.
With its cheeks puffed out behind its blooms, it’s like
a gang of Dizzy Gillespies and the final
freeze-frame for the story: except, somehow
Luke survived the train, and then the shock,
which also should have killed him.
still groggy from the drugs, he sensed the old throb
troubling the air and struggled growling to his feet
ready for round two. Talk about dumb. It was funny
and appalling, and we knew, wincing at each other,
that it wasn’t just our true intrepid friend
we were appalled by. When the Monarchs hatch
they’ll feed and flit and pollinate their hosts,
by accident, and after an infinitude of flits
wind up precisely in one Mexican valley. Some thoughts
live in the mind as larvae, some as the milk they feed on,
some as the wanderings which are the way. Heal-all,
Yarrow. Everything the tracks
have had no use for’s happening
between them.