Answering Neruda (12)

Perhaps they died of shame
those trains that lost their way?[1]

Plenty of mornings are paint peeling from the riveted skin of an abandoned freight or passenger car. Piebald rainbows, a distressed outlook fragmenting—the eye has a hard time telling the difference, depending on the light. Sometimes a yearning to steam, diesel, move overtakes me, even while something deep inside me oxidizes, as if collapsing into memories. Routine’s a coping mechanism—a walk along tracks going red and orange with rust, wooden ties between them black with moisture, greening with moss, crumbling—but it’s something with a pretense for use. Dust knows where this conversation is heading, the next stop.

Answering Neruda (13)

Isn’t it better never than late?[2]

An axe head flashes its parabola. Bark flies in large, dark scales, smaller fragments, dropping and spinning. The wood beneath gapes, wet and smooth until the metal bites and chunks go flying. You looked and ducked as if my face were reflected in the axe head’s polished sheen, the steel’s sharpened edge ready to chop away roots, trunk, whatever it came into contact with. We didn’t talk for years. Sometimes fear in your eyes stopped me, seeing my tongue as hands wrapped tight around a hickory handle, ready to swing. Sometimes it was a metal wedge somersaulting in my direction.

[1] The Book of Questions, XXVII
[2] The Book of Questions, XX