Story Problem
A passenger train left
Fresno at five o’clock heading east
traveling at forty-five
miles per hour. Precisely at eight
a sixty car freight pulled
out of Newport News,
reminding the pilot of a Kiowa
from the U.S.S. Lincoln
of his grandmother twenty
years gone.
He recalled the way she
worked yarn from the hank,
long strand leaving the
station, mile after mile rolled up,
falling asleep in her lap
wrapped in her lavender clacking.
A stiff arm westerly wind hove
up the track lost time
thinks the engineer six
years shy of retirement back
of his hand for a man on a
bike at a crossing,
absently grazing the
parchment patch of psoriasis
on his temple, cracked
finger like a dry lake bed
cueing on the button,
ragged bellow from the heart
of the beast - three short
blasts followed by one long -
inhaling the purest of
pleasures, closing his eyes
for a measure or two, teasing
out immortality
implicit in the Doppler
echo. Nevada state line
come and gone, the east
bound flyer boring
a burr hole into a fitful
sun, trepanned relief
for a morning possessed of
Föhn winds,
glinting aluminum hives
alive with larvae wriggling
beneath the leaf litter of
free USA Todays
because the WiFi is out
until Salt Lake City.
The caboose gone the way
of the buffalo but an elderly
Paiute in a dusty Ford
pickup with a rack full
of irrigation pipe
remembers receding red lights,
warm glow from the cupola
winking out at the horizon,
the conductor asleep, eyes
shelved beneath
the short brim of his blue
torte cap.
Which train will reach
Chicago first? For
Extra Credit what did the chopper
pilots grandmother knit?
