Birthday Poem with a Man on the Tracks
At times I believed I was a man on a train
when it shrieked and sparked
due to some injury outside,
some echo of my body in catastrophe
as my life’s work scattered from the satchel in my lap—
the buds yanked from my ears
so the joy that filled my head
became thin tin unwinding across the train car floor
and I faceplanted into a plastic seat.
I knew a crisis had occurred,
that professionals would race
to save what seemed doomed,
that I had no role beyond empathy
clouding my chest like a deep bone bruise.
And at times I felt cradled by rails
as if I’d lain in the way of a train
that was part of a life you needed to make,
and its approach I took for the tremors
of my own skeleton, the roar of its engine
a jeering applause I’d wake from
with the scent of your hair spread over the pillow
in civil twilight, minutes before the radio
roused you to make coffee. I’d stare
into your skull’s locked shell,
not in your arms but within reach,
sensing glimmers of the energy crackling inside you,
sensing less than ever how it gathers force
into a silver streak along a track.
***
And this is a true story: the man survived.
But how? Brained by tons of screaming steel,
a southbound passenger train from Evanston,
night before last. Maybe a lucky angle
cracked the skull just so. If anguished vines
bloomed in his brain, if he saw in the tracks
a trellis by which they might climb out of him,
and lay down and waited, he didn’t die.
***
While you sat belted above Missouri, I called
to hear your voice announce your married name,
then framed a few flat words around “happy.”
I sit with the documents you’ve compiled
for our final joint filing. I praise our division
of labor, our neutral exchanges, the thimblefuls
of anger we cool in separate fridges.
I look forward to your delivery of our children
in the morning. I embrace each conversation
with new dates, old friends, about how much crueler
it could have been. I praise utensils I’ve touched
ten thousand times behind a door whose key
I’ll take off my ring. I celebrate temporary furniture
and one corroded garage sale clock
and the several feet across the room you’ll stand
when you bring the kids, which I won’t cross.
Praise the night you turned the room to liquid
or revealed the slim solution in which we’d always been
suspended. Praise the breakwaters we build
and every wave that comes to shake them.
__________
Scott Beal