One more from this grouping of poems
of families and generations.
It's a poem called "Taking the Train Home."
It's in three short parts and it has in it
a piece of train data, which if you
live in that 95% of the country where
trains are no longer a live phenomenon,
I may have to footnote.
What you'll need to know is what a roundhouse is.
It's the answer to the question and compelling to a small boy.
How does a train turn around?
I gave myself endless headaches as a child
trying to solve that problem.
The boy in this poem apparently has a similar difficulty.
And his grandparents in the middle section of the poem,
when he's very small, take him out
to see a roundhouse, a large circular building,
which revolves like an enormous lazy Susan.
The locomotive goes in, it's turned 180 degrees
and the locomotive comes back out.
Fantastic.
It was magical.
It's still pretty good if you can find a roundhouse.
In the first section of this poem though,
before we get there, the boy is, oh, I don't know, some age.
Adolescence, maybe, seems to be.
He's called home.
Coming home on the train because someone is ill.
In the second section he's being taken to the roundhouse
by his grandparents.
In the third section taking the train home
for the funeral of his grandfather.
The sections are reasonably short
and I'll give a number for each of them.
Number one.
Dusk grew on the window.
I listened for the click of the seams and the rails
to come at the same speed the telephone wires sagged and then
shot upward to the pole.
All night I slept between the rails, a boy on a stretcher.
When I'd wake up outside Chillicothe,
I felt like a fish.
Alfalfa and cows appeared in as I
went by in my aquarium, my night in glass.
Dawn flew against my window the same way a fly swarms by itself
against the heat of a bare light bulb, like a heart attack.
I'd be home soon, 7:15, all out for Cincinnati.
Two.
Its Sunday and I'm only four.
And my grandparents are taking me to Sharonville
to the roundhouse.
Pop drives, the part and the white crest of his hair
is like a compass needle.
Nan sings.
From the back seat I lean between them.
I can feel the soot, the cinders like black popcorn
under my feet.
The roundhouse ceiling is charred by sparks and grime
smears its highest windows.
Coal cars smolder on sidings while the engine turns away
from its arrival.
I was going to live in a roundhouse
when I grew up, a lighthouse.
Every morning the moon would steam in over the sea
and turn around.
The table would be set for breakfast
before I went to bed, my little tower of pills
beside the juice glass.
My hair would be white like Pop's.
And by its light, the ship's long paths
of sleep and fuel oil, coffee beans, brooms with real straw.
By the light of my hair ships would
sleep into port and germinate.
Three.
In my dream I'm only four again.
Pop is alive.
He walks slowly, emphysema.
I've eaten something metallic, something I don't understand.
I circle away from him to vomit, among roadside weeds.
I force it up.
It's like gruel with roofing nails for lumps.
I love this dying man.
I look up and he bobs over a wave in the road.
He's swimming out to sea.
I begin following but my legs are too short.
Death is my father.
This is my body, which will fall apart.
I'm sleeping on the ocean.
I'm asleep on a train outside Red Lion, Ohio.
I don't know.
I can't tell, but it seems to me that if I could watch my body
sleep, it would glow, growing its antibodies to eternal life.
Growing the lives we give away when we wake.