On Track

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after Tom Wayman

The first thing I remember was under the train:
the sweet whiff of creosote, the gap to the platform,
and wheels in that darkness, bigger than me.
My father lifted me over the gap to a step;
I climbed the others. Next I remember alarm
that the sun had hit the rim of the earth and oozed
its gold like a cracking egg where the train was going.
"You can ride your whole life long," Dad said,
"and never reach the sun." Reassured,
I slept in a compartment overhead.

I liked how rows of crops we passed would bow
like tines on a comb you slide your thumb across.
Between the rows were sweat-soaked people, bent.
I peered through gaps where windows should have been
in shacks squeezed close to the tracks or remote in fields.
In winter, steam from bacon and coffee fogged
dark glass in the dining car. I'd rub a spot
to see snow drifts go by and vapor rise
from trucks and bundled workers at crossing gates,
my seat level with their red-flashing eyes.

Allowed to roam, I found my favorite nooks
to read and listen to music with others my age
who liked what I liked. Sometimes at a station
I'll wander out and think what life might be,
but someone with a sign Please Help is there,
and something should be done, I know, but what?
Unsettled after that, I'll climb back on
and soon that golden sun we're riding toward
will set, forever inspiring awe in me.
I'll return to my compartment, reassured.

Image by Susan Rouse.
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Tom Wayman's "Kitchen Poem" from 1977 is a lively immersion in the process of making breakfast that is also an exposition of global inequities. That resonated with a theology book I read this month, Miguel De La Torre's Reading the Bible from the Margins, and I liked the technique -- literal kitchen, metaphorical world. I've written about Wayman's selected poems 1973-1993 here.

I am very pleased that memories from age three in the first stanza are true, both literally and allegorically. - WSS