As part of the ongoing SDFP column Geo-Poetic Spaces
By Ishmael von Heidrick-Barnes
Taking trains
across country
looking through myself in windows
sky-scraping clouds rolling past
wheeling clocks
ticking off time
engineers can’t keep
I am many stations of being
departing arriving
shut down boarded up
erupting main streets in small towns
North
being south of New York Washington DC
bending in out of stops
on parallel lines
Cities of angels cast from shadows
shooting compass arrows
through
Chicago’s Grand Central Station
Inching through tunnels
Repressing
abandoned luggage carts of loneliness
overpassed by freeways
full speed ahead
into nights dreaming
states
Waking in another time zone
the rusty rails of North Dakota dawn
breaking
freight
The white man
is a busy little ant
in cold latitudes without hills
busy
cutting lines of communication with his genocidal past
Never mind Devil’s lake:
the bullet wound in prairie
shunned by the Sioux
The rush for fire is on
the six headed beast
is being fracked out of bedrock
the sacred hoop
plowed under
bricked up
broken again
Nothing can stop
greed’s runaway train
Not even Montana’s big sky
swooping down
so close
heaven cannot be outside of earth
Sucked
into a vortex of flying embers
tomorrow
thrusting itself upward out of prairie
where I am already disembarking
between trains
to read Aspen leaves
climbing
to the top of Continental Divide
where a man is three rivers
flowing into three separate seas
glaciers melting midnight ramps
waiting for the “all aboard,”
out of wilderness
The engine’s whistle
is washing up
on banks of the Kootenai
Kootenai:
a name for an ancestor
I never heard of outside viewing cars
tracing tree lines
back to Spokane before it is lost
in Columbia River Gorge
No more rocky peaks
just mountains
rounded by raining forests
logjams traversed by bridges
If men are islands
I am happy to be surrounded
by Vancouver’s eventide
salmon swimming up totem poles
harmless ghosts of my homeless self
jumping out of abandoned buildings
disappearing
with my departed soul
south
because there ain’t no song
sweeter than rail wheels
clanking across metal trestles
into steaming green Portland
Oregon isn’t a state
it’s a color
with texture eyes can’t touch
without windows weeping rain
it cries so hard
streams laugh
over cascading volcanos
pacified by ocean mist
The Northwest stops
and goes
goes
and stops
before sawing through sawmills
fields of next year’s Christmas trees
engines winding sharply
ahead of themselves
It becomes
a one way ticket to California
before passengers know it
Trains
can’t be diverted from poverty:
the invisible towns within cities
paying the cost for our joyride
A direct route
through generations of migrant workers
picking fruit they can’t afford to eat
sweating valleys
where Steinbeck grew up
drinking wine
from “grapes of wrath.”
Bitter vines
fermenting English
into Spanish speaking cabins
on a mission
sliding down,
“The world famous Southern Pacific Horseshoe Curve,”
into San Luis Obispo
where wealth is a poverty all its own
and I can’t stand what I see boarding the Surfrider
for a second class seat
bound for middle of road America
nowhere to be found
5,000 miles
20 states later
the country’s trading grain
for Vandenberg’s missile silos
on virgin screwed coast
making me wonder
how many secrets I keep from the lighthouse?
The signal may be red
but we are rushing into the gold
amnesia of Southern California sun
a land forever forgetting
where a child like me
grows up knowing sandy beaches
better than the slap of his backhand
Running full speed
toward
the underbelly of Los Angeles
blowing through intersections
to the end of tracks
and a home
I can’t recognize anymore
Latest posts by Ishmael von Heidrick-Barnes (see all)
- Word’s Out | Geo-Poetic Spaces - December 14, 2018
- Political Love Affair | Geo-Poetic Spaces - December 7, 2018
- Deer Tracks | Geo-Poetic Spaces - November 30, 2018
Thank you for this, Ish. It’s so good. I think it really captures truths about traveling. Home is never the same.