Consider

(the 1950s)

1.

Consider a train, passing fields and farms;
silos, barns, Holsteins and lowing tractors,
corduroyed farmers sweating

in the bright day, dust rising from the earth
like the ribbed drone of flies
purling green in the primeval daylight.

Consider the sonorous horn of this hematic streak
weeping brightly as it speeds on,
straight as the arrow in its headlong tumble,

rumbling laughingly as it sifts the dappled greens
and browns of that spare landscape,
tempering the endless acreage

provisioning the nation—that flat, felt land
sprawling alike the singing coastal cities
so relentless and intractable, curmudgeonly

and close-fisted, devouring their children
in the tens of thousands
with the gawping mouths

of their Mohammedan skyscrapers
lowering and wind-blown, piercing and lighting up
the vast electric night in ensemble.

Consider this myriapod existence
of steel and ossified will
thundering by on two slate-silver ribbons

running parallel for countless miles,
lacing the vast Midwest,
stitching up the endless column of ties

and occasional grade crossings
like hemp boot-laces, stringing the fields together
with gravel and barbed wire, signage,

burrs and tall grasses. Consider how this train
plies its route with a hale abandon,
calling its rhythmic lightning up from the earth,

up from the rocks and the dirt and flocks
of mourning doves calling out in the redbuds
and maples toward the enormous light.

2.

This train may crash. I tell it to you now:
this vagrant smear of maroon and vital orange
that rends the fields with searing, luminous fire

as it hurtles incandescently over the grassy-
knolled, grain-bleeding, cornrowed Shield
toward its terminus in sprawling,

smoking civilization—
the Twin Cities, with their endless depots
and boxcars and freight yards and shunters

all toiling away from sunup till sundown;
with their murky tenements and lucent towers,
shopfronts and movie-houses, dances halls

and all the rest—may meet its fragrant,
instantaneous destruction on a bad section of track
or a turn rushed into,

toppling car by car: crashing, careening, jerking,
jittering, jackknifing, compacting, and collapsing
in on itself like an accordion in subsidence,

steel walls crumpling and windows shattering,
roofs peeling open like sardine tins,
men and women in blue, brown,

and grey suits thrown about
like ragdolls in total confusion, landing
broken and haphazard to be crushed

by overturned settees, or ripped to shreds
by the wheels and steel girders,
blood spilling out of mangled bodies

to douse the sparking flames lapping greedily
at their charring limbs, their faces frozen
in silent cries of agony or mortal terror,

their eyes blank and milk-white,
rolled back into their fractured skulls,
and the many passengers aboard,

embarking at innumerable stations,
may, unknowing, be spending
their final breaths in the upcoming moments.

3.

Consider this slick culebra
sidewinding its way across the vast Prairielands
at the heart of this continent,

this orange, black-backed serpent
braiding its way through the empty shieldland
toward the far, western mountain ranges

so indomitable, snow-capped and sky-scraping,
vertiginous holy schist and gneiss thrusting
their gnarled rug-folds into the blue mountain air,

hog-backed and glaciated with Methuselan water.
Consider this train, a city on wheels:
coaches and dome cars, taverns and diners,

sleepers, the mobile post office.
Consider the inside of the observation car,
so strikingly modern and strewn with amenities:

Plush reclining seats and couches, panoramic
windows, lamps and indirect lighting. Softest
touches. Crisp, clean lines throughout,

wood veneer and polished metal.
Stylish, canny understatement. And air-conditioned,
the 20th Century's saving grace of all graces.

Consider its construction, steel trusses
and plate glass in a gyroscopic half-bullet-head,
an arch geometric prism 27-faceted,

surrounding idle men and women in pressed suits.
A bird-cage of light enshrouding
in an elongated glass dome,

swimming in the rays of blue afternoon sun.
How shall this fabricated luxury hold its own,
if the onslaught of Nature should present itself?

4.

Consider the Atom Bomb,
which was dropped on Hiroshima by a bomber
baptized after the pilot's mother;

which killed over 60,000 people instantly,
vaporizing them into atomic particles
that stained the stone steps and roads of the city,

and crafted a crater over two miles wide,
destroying buildings with fanatical passion,
pulverizing stone, concrete, wood, and tile

through heat and shockwave blast;
which continued to kill Hiroshima's citizens
by the thousands in the days and weeks

that followed, through radiation sickness, burns,
and malnutrition, bringing the total death toll
to 146,000; which happened also in Nagasaki

three days later with a toll of 80,000 souls,
a lesser number due to the mountainous terrain
of the locale redirecting

the blast-waves of the second Bomb;
and some top generals in the war who were against
the use of these bombs, who preferred

to continue using conventional incendiaries
to carpet-bomb as they had above Tokyo,
and President Truman who ordered they be used;

and the young pilots who likewise were uncertain
of their duty's moral standing
in dropping bombs of such unbridled brutality

on innocent civilians who had little to do
with Imperial Nippon's military machine
beyond those conscripted laborers in factories;

and the new world also which spawned
on that day, August 6, 1945,
a world of great and terrible machines

which the World's Powers hurried to stockpile
in an ever-escalating arms race
which we now find ourselves confronting;

which hangs over our heads a wanton sword
that casts our faces in sickly pall
with cadaverous refracted sunlight,

our eyes sunken,
our hands bony and grasping
at shreds of blind hope in this uncertain Age—

5.

Consider the engineer and the conductor
in the cab of the locomotive, as it streaks across
vast, thicketed Montana, en route from Chicago—

with its dockyards and freighters and ore-loaders
all toiling and laboring dustily away,
with its spiderweb of train stations and rail lines

connecting our nation's farthest points together,
a vast and ever-complicating machine—
toward Spokane and Seattle on the Pacific coast,

hauling its frail cargo of ordinary human lives
in sveltest finery, its interior stylings
the cream of our postwar modernité.

It is their job to make sure their train leaves safely
and arrives safely, never encountering
disruption or delay.

What if, through negligence or illness,
they might fail in their duty, and thus
through their onus their train come to grief?

If so, the men and women aboard this lightning
flyer, in their elegant traveling clothes,
mothers watching over sons and daughters,

fathers reading the daily paper
or talking politics with their fellow men,
economy passengers in their reclining chairs,

spendthrifts in their private rooms, honeymooners
in the Super Dome taking photos of the passing
landscapes, all of their lives would be forfeit!

150 souls injured or extinguished in a burning wreck
of twisted metal cockle-shells
piled ignominious on some Alpine rail line,

blocking traffic in and out of the pass
where they met their end.
What, if such a fate befall these innocent travelers!

6.

Consider this wry, fitful, intransigent world
in which we find ourselves now inhabiting,
which demands our servitude

and utmost compliance in the new ways of living
running rampant, pugnacious,
impersonal and impervious to all assault now,

restructuring our lives into modes cold and strange,
where at this very moment
Hollywood is making blockbusters in sunny Italy

borne on the backs of her poor Southern farmers,
and Hollywood is flying her stars into Rome
to appear in these Spaghetti-films

and crass tabloid papers
cropping up, staffed by ungovernable
photographers and reporters,

and Elvis is gyrating his hips
to the youth-shod trill of a million prepubescent
girls, and Rome's beautiful liners are sinking

in Nantucket's waters,
and the Iron Curtain has come down with a bang,
and airplanes are the finest new way to travel,

no longer the means of California's elite,
and what's a few crashes to douse public opinion?
The new Comet's flaws are merely contrition.

America is searching within the atom for Peace,
and seeking to emphasize her right to the sky,
stockpiling her nuclear marvels,

singing her war-cry,
hawking her blue jeans for the whole world to buy,
and cities are putting fluoride in their water supply,

town taps burnishing teeth pearly-white,
and Senator McCarthy has the whole of the nation
seeing Reds in their stockings,

and Allen Ginsberg is hawking his scurrilous poetry,
and supermarkets are proliferating,
supplanting the grocers,

and America will admit to no wrongdoing
in dropping the Bomb, and the Marshall Plan
is siring economic Miracles,

and everyone wants their plastic flamingoes,
as America and Russia
wage proxy wars across Eurasia,

bombarding their vassals, and merry the Devil
who tends the flame-flowers of evil,
and Kaliningrad is in ruins, and so is Poland,

and Russia has outlawed jazz yet again,
and every man fancies himself a poet,
and the whole world is sliding into intractable panic,

children huddling under desks
and fearing the sirens announcing
the imminent bombs overhead spiraling,

alike a clumsy old albatross careening
onto the deck of a sultry destroyer
hove to and brandished in territorial disputes—

How does one keep hope in this godless new age?
How can't one madden
at the news overflowing in these rank, dismal days

from our many newspapers?
And what can be done if one drops the bomb
on the heads of those riding

this automaton striation, as it cascades volubly
over her tempered steel ribbons?
What if this train should yet wreck? What then?

Who shall then mourn these innocents
caught in the crosshairs of Fate's ready riflemen
aiming so deadly at the forefront of history?

Coda.

The train does not crash. The engineer and conductors
attend to their duties, and no harm bursts
in the air from above. All is well on this autumn day.




---Published by Creation Magazine, Issue #6, August 2024
---Note: The train described is the Milwaukee Road's Olympian Hiawatha.
---Posted here 10/11/2024