The whole poem seems to grow out of one pun in its title. Say "The Other Coltrane" quickly and you can hear a coal train rattling inside the name of the famous jazz saxophonist. Dave Bonta offers the "other" Coltrane: not a musician on a stage but a freight train passing in the dark, whose music is made of scrape, shriek and weight.
The poem is a single sentence that never quite finishes. It opens on "when" (when the moon is a sliver, when you hear the wheels) and instead of arriving at a main clause it slides into a question: "don't it make you shiver / that night train". There is no question mark, no capital letter, no full stop anywhere. Like a train of ninety-nine cars, the sentence doesn't stop for anything. The ampersand and the loose, spoken "don't it" give the voice a relaxed, song-like ring, as if the speaker were leaning on a porch rail and nudging a neighbour to listen.
The opening image is the cleverest. The new moon is a "pale fingernail against / the blackboard." It starts as a picture, since a crescent really is the shape of a nail, but the comparison quietly turns into a sound. Nobody looks at a fingernail on a blackboard; we wince at it. Before any train appears, the eye has become an ear, and the night sky has become a black slate being scratched. The line break helps. "Against" hangs for a moment, and we brace for the scrape before "the blackboard" arrives.
That wince is answered two lines later by "the shriek of wheels gone / slightly off-true with the track." "Off-true" is a precise, slightly surprising phrase. A wheel out of true is a mechanical fault, but the words also suggest pitch, and it is hard not to hear a note bent a little sharp, the way a jazz player might do on purpose. The poem seems to invite that reading by borrowing a musician's name. The sound also links back to the first stanza, since "blackboard" and "track" share their closing sound, so the scrape and the rail are joined in the ear.
The middle stanza trades screech for mass: "ninety-nine cars heaped high with coal / hurtling by in the darkness." Nobody counts cars at a crossing at night, so ninety-nine feels like a hyperbole, the largest number you can reach without it becoming a hundred, a train that seems to have no end. "Heaped" and "hurtling" share an h that gives the line a lurching heave. We never see the coal, only its darkness inside darkness. The poem is told almost entirely through hearing, which is how a person standing beside a track at night would actually experience such a train.
Though the poem is free verse, with no regular metre and no pattern of line length, it has one real rhyme: "sliver" at the very start and "shiver" near the end. Because nothing else rhymes, the chime is easy to feel. It also does some work. The thin light of the moon, the sliver, becomes a physical reaction in the listener, the shiver. That shiver is deliberately ambiguous. It could be cold, fear or the thrill of a great sound, and the casual question "don't it make you shiver" leans toward thrill, the way music can raise the hair on your arms.
The ending is three short words, "that night train." The "that" matters. It isn't "a" train but a particular, familiar one, as though the speaker is pointing at a memory or at something the reader has heard too. After the long heave of the middle stanza, the short last line works like the final car clattering past.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space. It takes an ordinary industrial noise and treats it as music, without inflating it into something grand. The word "other" is humble: this Coltrane is a coal train, and a poem still finds its jazz. It also shows how sight, sound and touch can cross over, with a moon becoming a scratch and a scratch becoming a shiver. A reader who has stood by a railway line at night will recognise the experience at once, and that recognition is what the poem offers.