If you were to stop and ask me
how long I have been as I am,
a man who hates nothing
and rides old trains for the sake
of riding, I could only answer
with that soft moan I’ve come
to love. It seems a lifetime I’ve
been silently crossing and recrossing
this huge land of broken rivers
and fouled lakes, and no one has cared
enough even to ask for a ticket
or question this dingy parody
of a uniform. In the stale,
echoing stations I hunch over a paper
or ply the air with my punch
and soon we are away, pulling out
of that part of a city where the backs
of shops and houses spill out
into the sunlight and the kids
sulk on the stoops or run aimlessly
beneath the viaducts. Then we are
loose, running between grassy slopes
and leaving behind the wounded
wooden rolling stock of another era.
Ahead may be Baltimore, Washington,
darkness, the string of empty cars
rattling and jolting over bad track,
and still farther up ahead the dawn
asleep now in some wet wood far
south of anywhere you’ve ever been,
where it will waken among the ghostly
shapes of oak and poplar, the ground fog
rising from the small abandoned farms
that once could feed a people. Thus
I come back to life each day
miraculously among the dead,
a sort of moving monument
someone who can say “yes” or “no”
kindly and with a real meaning,
and bending to hear you out, place
a hand upon your shoulder, open
my eyes fully to your eyes, lift
your burden down, and point the way.