Classic Poem

You're on the train
and gone now. . . . Driving home,
I hear the diesel horn from Martindale,
and again, faintly, from Craryville.
A dying sound ...

A dying beast,
bellowing its last into the frozen swamps;
struck and sold short and kept moving
by court order and the trainman's curse ...

Young man,

you aren't riding in style,
nor on any wave
save the dead ebb of one
Cornelius Vanderbilt strode, glittering
onto a remote reef of the Century.

Even so, it pulls us apart —
eleven miles long and lengthening,
our last handgrip across the grinding wheels. . . .
I hadn't finished. What was it
I meant to tell you?

Someone, when I was four,
pointed out overhead an eagle. It shed rings
of vertigo and of glory.
And again, at eighteen, a first snow
falling among oak leaves and swamp candles —
a molt of time — rustled
around me like Ecclesiastes — gentle
erasure and a cold elation.

Beside me the heavy slab
of the TIMES lies like a tombstone
scored with the epitaphs of the World. The Whole
System is Breaking Down. Money has moved
on, out of rails, into madness
and real estate on the moon,
futures in black air and dead waters,
a corner on cobalt, a bull
market in Terra-cide. No no,

I should have asked forgiveness —
because I could not save the last eagle
and already the golden bowl is broken
and the pitcher is broken at the cistern. . . .

Whatever it was I hollered
finally, a last hedge
on such an investment of life's blood
into a dying railroad —
those old bone-jarring trucks and couplings
shrieking toward Desperate City — I've tears now
for trains the fathers have taken
that set the sons' teeth on edge.