The train won’t stop here anymore. The station
(or so you say) was stripped of its accessible
copper wire by a tweaker who played the bass
in your high school orchestra, and ironically
defaced: the porcelain Amtrak sign still reads
‘CLAmtrak.’ As the pure siren Dopplers through
our bodies – major sixth chord, a sharper key
than the mildly depressed diminished sevenths
of the freight trains that hourly suffer this town,
lurid with Burlington Northern green – it fills
your lungs (or so you say) like the last songs
of Strauss or David Bowie, all things that ache
made holy. Let it be written. If we could see
ourselves from here (thin testamental grooves
of fervor disinfecting us, leaving their marks
where they meet skin – here, and here – already
gone once we feel them), we might understand
that we are still there.
That it won’t come back.
Todd Smith 