The speaker of "Train Song" crouches in a wooded bend of the railroad, running through his gear like a man packing for a trip: duffle bag, Zippo lighter, deck of marked cards. The items are small but telling. Together they make a drifter's kit, something to carry, something to burn, something to cheat with. The deadpan repetition of "check" turns the moment into a drill, and he sounds half like a soldier and half like a boy playing outlaw. What he is actually doing is waiting for a train, something he admits he has done "all my life" without ever getting on.
The heart of the poem is a single long sentence, and it moves the way a train passes. "All my life I've been listening to trains / & all my life I've been letting them go by": the repeated phrase and the ampersands give the line a steady, clacking rhythm. The sound is rendered closely. A whistle is "Dopplering down / from summons to wail," a verb made from the physics of pitch shifting as a source rushes past. The same sound that calls to him turns into a lament as it leaves. The freight's noise is compared to "any heavy metal band," and a misaligned wheel shrieks "like feedback from a speaker." These are loud, modern, slightly comic comparisons, and they keep the poem from sliding into soft nostalgia. The only visual detail is the graffiti, "flying past / too fast to parse." The world he longs for reaches him as noise and unreadable messages, and the shriek goes on "all the way to Chicago" while he stays put.
Then comes a surprising denial: "It's not that I want to travel." What drives him is closer to suffocation: "this sky's / too narrow, too full of murk. / It hurts to breathe." The enjambment after "this sky's" makes the complaint land hard. The poem then drops from the sky to the body. He rolls up a pants leg and finds "another goddamned tick / just starting to burrow in." The moment is funny and gross, and it brings him back to his skin. The word "another" suggests this isn't his first vigil in these woods. Judging by the imagery, the tick also works as a small echo of his larger problem, something clinging and slowly digging into a life he wants out of.
What he imagines instead is a place defined by what it lacks: "Out West, I've heard, there are places so empty / nobody's even given them a name yet." The phrase "I've heard" matters, because he knows the world mostly by ear. After the graffiti he couldn't read, an unnamed place has real appeal. It promises a landscape with no labels and no messages to parse, a blank page rather than a lonely one.
Formally, the poem is free verse, with lines that stretch and shrink to match the action. For most of its length it avoids rhyme, which keeps it conversational. Near the end, rhyme arrives, and it is the only rhyme in the poem. "Freight" is paired with "date," and "now" with "how." The short lines ("Here comes / one now. Hear how") break into fragments as if the speaker is catching his breath while the train closes in. "Date" is a wry, flirtatious word for an appointment with a freight, though it also leaves a shadow of ambiguity. The gear suggests he means to board, but the poem never confirms it, and it stops before he moves.
The last image gives the poem its title. The rails, which really do hum before a train arrives, are "starting to sing." The song belongs to the track, not to the man, and he is finally answering it. The poem's value lies in how it takes the old romance of the freight train and gives it a modern, self-aware voice, with a Zippo, a tick, and a heavy metal thunder. It captures a restlessness that is less a wish to see places than a need for room to breathe, and it leaves us right at the threshold of the choice.