The Millennial Pedestrian

Online workshop blog: In my last post I noted that an image of a burning station in Adam Zagajewski’s poem "The Three Kings" had inspired me to write a poem but that it wasn’t finished. Well, now it is. I think. Since that posting I’ve been fiddling with "The Burning Station" and now I’m ready to share it with you. It’s still a "work in progress," though, so if you have any thoughts or comments, pro or con, please send them on. Maybe we can workshop this poem together.

 
The Burning Station

No passengers, no embarkations,
no arrivals here in decades.
A wheezing bus stops once a day in each direction
and hurries to the Interstate five miles away.
The tracks are now new cars and rebar.
But some of us remember
the thump of mailbags on the platform,
the anxious glances
from the blank horizon
to the faces of unsympathetic watches.
At last the yellow oscillating headlamp blinks,
visible for miles through veils of high plains heat
so that its progress seems illusionary,
so that even at a mile a minute five minutes can go by
and still the burning eye hangs low, immobile,
glazing with apparent fire the smooth quicksilver track.

And then the suddenly tremendous train
bursts past the crossing gates just west of town,
halts with neat precision on its spot,
displays its daily dramas of welcome and farewell
and exits to a music that more truly than the
thin and wind-blown pealing of our church’s bell
defines the center of our lives.

Late last night
the flames burned through the roof.
Families on the ridge saw from their bedroom windows
the lurid flickering on the prairie’s rising moonlit pewter.
This morning in the horizontal snow
a gauzy smoke blows from the station’s ashes.
The stationmaster’s stove still stands
with Nordic dignity amid the charred and fallen timbers.
 
Bent like grasses in the rising wind,
a few young civic types talk eagerly
of restoration, of a restaurant, of a
“brand-new heart of town.”

Some of us remember
when the trains stopped here.
We want to say that much more than a station
has been lost
and that a beating heart, once stilled,
is dead.