It’s early again, and I can hear the train, many miles away, running along the edge of the bay. Since there is no other ambient noise, it is as clear as if it were just down the hill. Until he was born and got older and began to talk all the time about trains, to ask me if I heard that sound, I didn’t hear it, though it was there all along. Now it is as if my ear has been tuned to it, no matter how faint the signal.
Two sleeps. The first dark but calm. The second, the sleep of an adult? Is this what Sarah is hearing, deep in sleep? Maybe it is not about her sleep, but about mine. Whose sleep is full of these terrible cries, and who is crying out?
At first the train enters the poem, then it is taken out, leaving only its echo in “conductor,” a word that resonates with other meanings (electrical, musical) potentially to be explored.
The poem is still circling around something important. The objects in it—sleep, tunnel, light and its absence, tree, sky, building, clouds—seem to be holding a place for something I cannot yet clearly understand. Later, through the window of a room in downtown Oakland, I will look up from my reading or writing and become distracted once again by the endlessly fascinating spectacle across the street of a new structure being built, some kind of office building, or apartments. Giant machines lifting huge girders and other things, nameless to me, high in the air.
Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night. Even if he hardly makes a sound, I wake up too. It must be the legacy of that first night, the connection formed when he slept on my chest. Even through two closed doors I can hear him, tossing restlessly, then murmuring a few words.
When I go in, I ask him what is wrong, already knowing he won’t be able to answer me. Standing there in the dark, above his bed, looking down at his small body, I am wracked with anguish. Other parents can talk with their children. A few days ago, I had watched another father, who had been chatting with his four-year-old, a classmate of our son’s. I said to that father, You know, I have never had a conversation with my child. At most, a single exchange, one question asked and a short answer. He looked at me in horror, and we both turned away.
Even though he is not feeling well, soon he is happily talking about trains. He loves trains so much and talks about them all the time in his waking life; they must fill his dream life as well. I don’t know what it is exactly about trains. Maybe because they are similar enough to belong all to one category, but full of endless variations (diesel, bullet, steam engine, hopper car, gondola car, flat car, tanker, beloved caboose), each with intricate, functional parts. Maybe it is the variegated anthropomorphic faces of the engines: headlights for eyes, rivets for mouth, and sometimes a little chimney hat. They can be endlessly drawn and colored and organized into satisfying rows. There are many mesmerizing videos of people making trains out of recycled household objects, like soda cans and boxes, repurposing everything into gorgeous models where every part fits gracefully into the next.
I never thought much about trains before. Now I am fascinated by them too. And I realize how many songs there are that I listen to, and sing and play on guitar, that refer to them, their lonesome whistles, their endless, lonely possibility.
Once, I asked him why he loved trains so much, and as an answer received, “Because they run on tracks,” which is as good a reason as any. Predictability intersecting with the pleasure of variation. Or
