Lackawanna Rail

All night the engines slept below us

in their bulky shed,

while boxcars waited,

wagon after wagon filled with coal.

I woke up early, rubbed my eyes,

and watched the rail yard gather to itself

its definitions:

corrugated iron rippling roof,

a red brick wheelhouse centering the lot,

and blue rails streaming north and south.

We’d come out early

on the night before to eat and drink:

cold sandwiches and beer

amid the honeybees that stuck

and fed in blood-bright flowers

as we smoked a pack of Lucky Strikes

and lied about the girls

we loved so well. The night sprayed

stars, and fireflies

temporized in ghost-capped hogweed,

and the crickets thrummed.

We were just fourteen,

both willowy and sad

with all the world before us like a hill

that wouldn’t budge.

We slept against its shoulder

through the August night.

I watched you breathing in the brittle grass

with dandelions almost like a crown

of bloom in your blond hair.

In T-shirt, shorts, and yellow sneakers,

you were like a girl

with slender wrists and puffy lips.

Your eyelids trembled,

and I had to wonder what you dreamed.

Whatever we had said,

the night before was nothing now.

I didn’t weigh it heavily

in breaking dawn, its bony light

and sickly sweet fermented breeze

that drew across a beer can

spilled nearby. And soon the wagons

clicked and swayed as pistons

cranked the day into a date,

a time when something was accomplished,

hard coal hauled from here to there

as butterflies and birds began

to graze from flower to flower,

from minute into hour,

and everything around us

flushed and fluttered, then broke free.