Elegy at Middle River
It’s an hour before noon, and Amtrak train no. 56 rips a path
through the rain outside Baltimore,
its speed screamed across the iron-black bones
of the track, our train now stopping in the woods,
no platform, and I pull Al Green
out of my ears to a car completely hushed. We wait,
wait longer, till the intercom stirs; says
nothing. Someone folds gum into his mouth and chews.
An older couple up ahead is peeling the skin
off dark plums. Across the aisle a little girl’s feet dangle
inches from a slippery floor scummy from people’s shoes,
holding a water-filled bag of goldfish to her face
like a hungry cat. Her mother looks over, smiles,
covers her daughter’s ears, explains, we hit something,
probably a deer, so low she only mouths it,
and we watch another train worker pass
beneath the windows, his hair gathered and curled
in the rain. A man comes back from the train café,
hands his wife her tea, tells her the conductor’s locked
himself in the restroom, won’t come out,
and for the next two hours no one
speaks a word. Sometimes an arm
pulled through a sleeve, skin surfacing for air.
Sometimes the gravel’s gray teeth
crunched under service men’s boots. Sometimes a moan
from the dumb weight of the engine—a beast stilled
by what is pinioned beneath it. The little girl
opens her bag of fish, and pushes half of her sandwich,
crusts cut off by her mother, into the water, and outside
a dog barks at nothing, a siren, and a worker’s found a phone,
holding it out like it’s burning his hand, and the little girl
tosses the sopped bread into the aisle, one of her fish
flopping out with it and I listen to its wetted slap,
watch it flail, rose-gold and nothing’s getting better,
and we know it.
Notes:
“Elegy at Middle River” is from A Bright and Borrowed Light by Courtney Kampa. Copyright © 2025 by Will Anderson Music LLC. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Source: Poetry (October 2025)