[I am away, and though]

with a phrase from Denise Levertov’s “To the Reader”

I am away, and though I do not know yet that my father is dead, 
I wake three times when trains pass by the house in Nelson 
County where I am staying. It is fall, just, still time for open 
windows, for porch talk and stinkbugs and jewelweed by the 
road.

*

The road follows the river, the tracks follow the river, and 
this house stands high above river, road, and tracks, where it 
has been and has been. A houseful of women, and the train a 
masculine thing—knuckleball or monkey wrench, gravel pit, 
piss in a bucket. A fire hose of forward.

*

Unless the bridge fails or the train derails. Last April this river 
on fire not far from here after a trainload of crude spilled into 
it. When I was a girl, no one swam in this river or ate anything 
from it. Kepone is still buried in its silt. Down east, this river 
widens into a mucked harbor, a waterfront all set upon by gulls.

*

Typically, it’s the first-year bird that wanders—the bunting off 
course at the end of autumn, shying from the sea’s wide stretch, 
a drift of warblers in the wind off the coast—or so I’ve read.

*

I’ve read that the most toxic cargo hauls at night on trains manned 
by skeleton crews with mystery manifests, and mostly, they work in 
clamorous darkness inside the bundled metal of container cars that 
rust and roll past our curtained and oblivious sleep.

*

A hospital room with his bed in the center, a view of the water, 
a port, a terminus, salt-licked and sandy. His room, his view, his
waking, his sleep, and the sea, always, turning its dark pages in the 
greater darkness.

Read more from Issue 16.2.