At the depot, Ruth steps forward, arms
stretched out with a carpetbag.
Edmonia can’t hear her words past the window,
pasted shut with ice and grime.
The train speeds ahead by fields and words
scattered like stones around tracks she can’t see.
She left behind even that packed carpetbag,
afraid someone might accuse her of stealing
something she kept on her lap or behind her feet.
She carries only bread and water.
With all Ruth’s talk about where she’s going,
Edmonia never asked where she came from.
What was she was going to tell that day
she asked Edmonia to listen? What chance was missed?
The unspoken words fit like tight sleeves
Edmonia can’t shrug off, even as she tells herself
they don’t matter. She won’t see Ruth again.
The locomotive shears past ancient stones,
hemlocks, swamp oaks, gooseberries, and milkweed.
Red birds fly to escape the shriek of skidding wheels.
Silently, she chants, Faster, faster,
wanting to move more swiftly than memory
or manitous who won’t stay under branches, stones,
or skin, but shift shape or disappear like shadows.
She has only the future now, a place her aunts
knew was necessary but dangerous,
as they stitched a slow way forward with thin thread,
making blankets and baskets too small to be used.
No one can steam straight ahead like the train,
for time buckles. The past insists on a chase.
Will she ever again see her aunts hunching over baskets?
Reeds bend when they’re damp, so her aunts lifted them
to their mouths, breathing in life. They held birchbark
over flames, just close enough for it to soften, then curved
it into small canoes they spread on blankets.
Tourists offered a few coins for swift
journeys to places where they’d never live.
The train rattles on, unsteady as cheers
that can turn in an instant to threats.
Edmonia’s arms ache as if pulling back the string
of a bow with no arrow to shoot forward.
She won’t look back through glass and smoke
to snowy woods where no boy will take her hand
in a promise or a lie. She won’t ever again stand
before a judge with the power to put her behind bars.
She won’t find herself alone in a dark field.
She won’t be like her aunts being chased out of the forests
or her father going north in the night
or Hagar heading into the wilderness.
She means to leave behind everything but the sky.
No place is safe. Danger is everywhere.
She is the clatter and drum on train tracks,
certain she’s going the wrong way
and that she can’t turn back.