Drybridge

Claude says he, too, was given the tracks and not

the train, the way — and not the way out, not the beyond

beyond that bend, or the next. The place

they call Drybridge — for the waterless bed

of rails — where on the banks, you grow up learning

more news from hoboes than from the mailman.

But you know nothing of the train as it passes

behind the backs of grander houses, gutted

warehouses, chained dogs, as it grazes an alien

grid of fences — of stone, metal, and chain-link.

Or that when it passes beneath the underside

of a bridge, a boy your own age waves the way

you do, and that there is a horse doesn’t lift its head,

and one that does, only to lower it again.

You are a grown man when the train comes

to a scalding stop, and a lantern swings down

the road. A man has been killed, they call out

from behind the light’s aura, and would you come see

what you can tell of him by what’s left. You do

know his hat, and that burn scar on the back

of his hand. What you know of his wife

you do not say and will not even the next

night when you sit up with the body in the house

he wanted that much shut of, her voice rigid

as its walls while the train you hear out there in the darkness

passes by the way it always does, as though

the same, the very same, and, again, on

the time it will this night be able to keep.