On Zephyr #5

I couldn't afford the sleeper
so curled up, like foxes
or sheep, the Latin hunter
in wool, I lied
across two train tracks
too dreamy from rocking,
barely a buck or a cute lip
for the trip, no coffee,
no cheap monte cristo hack
here, too ready
to be home soon, the motion
hurtling through space and midnight airs,
past Nebraska; they say
this boat began
in Chicago, a Noah's Ark
of everyone else
and whistling to the tuning
of heartstrings on railway ties,
heading somewhere
Pacific, the same track perhaps
that I lay pennies and quarters
smashing flattened into
their nickle-copper corpses
a flash and a sharp quick edge,
a ripple ridge
mirrored presidential faces,
the traces of my childhood wishes
and humid Midwestern fairy summers,
dying slowly, the higher west I run
the better I breathe, I believe
I can almost smell glaciers
and their early September snow;
my eyes miles further
mediating sleep, closed to the cold
the boxcar brilliant spark,
the silvery tin can against the dark,
all us here sardines now, heading to the mountains
and further, back to the water
to spawn.

Reviews

[W.k.kortas]

I was going to complain about the pacing until I realized that the Zephyr was a train--and, indeed, the poem has that crossing-the-ties kind of beat to it. There is some wonderful wordplay and imagery here--the coins turned into "nickel-copper corpses" on the tracks, the notion of the riders as 'sardines", the return home as spawning. A very nice piece of writing.