Poem 258

This was written a few years after the previous poem – I’ve got to the point where I’m able to puncture the mythology while still being taken by it – and is influenced by the bravura first chapter of Woody Guthrie’s Bound For Glory – it’s got great momentum as befits a train poem (title from Elvis’ Mystery Train) …

… the narrator is riding on top of the train so it’s much more visceral than being in a carriage or a freight car, they’re surrounded by speed space and weather – the train metaphor is about how living your life at speed allows constant escape from any mess you’ve left behind, giving you a clear vantage point ahead but the smoke of your passage rendering your past confused obfuscated and un-understandable …

( bracketed/bracketed is intended to evoke the sound of the train (my version of a Robert Louis Stevenson poem I learnt at primary school that mimicked train rhythm) – I like the near-rhyme of dreamed/streaming, the woman’s hair in the green graveyard, the belting clouds (in the sense of belting along), the figurehead/gargoyle/petty god riding the train like a jockey … )

Train Train

All the great liars
Guthrie Dylan Kerouac
dreamed of this streaming
out across the plains aching
sky ahead boys and sticks
at all the crossings a woman's
hair blowing in a green graveyard
rails pouring out ahead
pulled out of the earth rolling
from the furnace like a scorching shit
two iron fingers that produce the horizon
as neatly as the card you thought of slides from the deck

everything snaps by like washing in the wind
and lightning cuts slab after slab of dark air
from the belting clouds above
eyes squeezed like lemons in the cold
you strain forward like a figurehead
a gargoyle a petty god while the country
goes in great gulps bracketed
bracketed by the train

look ahead look only ahead
for behind
the rails cut a land full of smoke