It’s my third sleepless dawn on the Zephyr
and I’m in Iowa. Outside my window,
a gopher tunnels out of its purgatory
and wobbles across the sugary snow.
Over the aisle, I watch Tanika crush
grains as pink as the sky, then take
a quick hit on her pipe. She’s on the run.
Her six kids are somewhere in Indiana;
the last time she spoke to her mother,
the old woman shouted, ‘No good
comes of breeding with niggers and spics,’
meaning the fathers of Tanika’s children.
‘I wish I was in The Wizard of Oz,’
Tanika mumbles as we slice
through the American vastness.
Everyone here has one foot in life
and the other in the future, or the past –
usually in the past. Jane, who looks and sounds
like Jessica Lange, reminisces about years
spent working in the circus: ‘It was
the ’70s. I was living in England,
and you really needed a union card
to get any work as an actress,’
so she spent five gruelling months
touring the continent on an elephant.
Her raw tongue licks the edge
of her jagged teeth: ‘The dwarves
were the worst: mean, horny things …
‘One night, two of them tried to rape me,
but the bearded lady, my friend,
gave them a hiding they’ll never forget!’
At Reno, Jane and the vets in their caps
begin their week of blackjack and slots.
We slow down before Denver
and during a stop munch our way
through Jane’s special brownies;
Lenny, our conductor, plucks a steel guitar
and yells, ‘Yo-delay, yo-delay, all aboard!’
Later, he hands me the day’s newspaper:
Russia’s invaded Crimea again.
If history comes first as tragedy, second as farce,
then what shall we call this third act
we’re trying so hard to survive in?
That evening, as we draw near to Chicago,
the passengers turn in unison
to face the horizon; I watch a burst
of dew crystallize in the crisp, purple air,
each droplet shining like a diamond
till it fades away in the distance.
‘How pretty,’ I think. The next day, Lenny
will tell me this could only mean one thing:
someone was flushing the toilet.