Mest læste ▸
James Weldon Johnson
"She's built of steel
From deck to keel,
And bolted strong and tight;
In scorn she'll sail
The fiercest gale,
And pierce the darkest night.
"The builder's art
Has proved each part
Throughout her breadth and length;
Deep in the hulk,
Of her mighty bulk,
Ten thousand Titans' strength."
The tempest howls,
The Ice Wolf prowls,
The winds they shift and veer,
But calm I sleep,
Many ways to spell good night.
Fireworks at a pier on the Fourth of July
spell it with red wheels and yellow spokes.
They fizz in the air, touch the water and quit.
Rockets make a trajectory of gold-and-blue
and then go out.
Railroad trains at night spell with a smokestack
mushrooming a white pillar.
Steamboats turn a curve in the Mississippi crying
in a baritone that crosses lowland cottonfields
to a razorback hill.
It is easy to spell good night.
Many ways to spell good night.
when the new moon’s still a sliver
pale fingernail against
the blackboard
& you hear
the shriek of wheels gone
slightly off-true with the track
ninety-nine cars heaped high with coal
hurtling by in the darkness
don’t it make you shiver
that night train
Where the buck took a hunter’s bullet & lay down
in the laurel, a dozen chipmunks are calling
in unison – mallets on a xylophone
all striking the same, middle bar.
Too much moderation seems a dangerous thing.
We are only ever saved by what exceeds us.
When old fields fall to subdivisions,
the kinds of thoughts that need an unbroken span of sky
vanish along with the hiccup of the Henslow’s sparrow,
the wind in the grass.
A few house lots hazarded in the forest
& the wolves begin to forget how to lope,
halt in the middle of a howl –
a freight train wailing through the gap two hundred years later.
All it lacks is the shiver – such a small thing.
It hardly seems reasonable to demand the return
A year at sea, and
the worm in my heart
is like a train through
a city I never heard of.
waking on the train
I see a hawk
absurd men laughing
about office business
the evening train
I hear a mouse under
my table
the sun was a letter
of the alphabet then
my stomach could pronounce it
better than my mouth
on the walk to school through
two centuries of wreckage
past a ghost village
and the end of town eaten
by the interstate
along train tracks we knew
to get off of when
they started to hum
up over the wooded hill
in the center of town
with its water tank and cemetery
past hidden rooms
railroad crossing
all the train horns
I hear in my sleep
in the unloved woods
between train tracks and river
needles and condoms
a shirt abandoned
by the fire ring
homeless campsite
floodplain
mosquitoes turning blood
into whine
It’s sandal season—
you bring back a blister
from the canal.
Light from the water
plays on the steel girders.
A train’s screeching wheels.
Leading a crew
of gnomes and potted plants,
the jolly roger.
After the canal boat passes,
the huge floating leaf
reverses course.
Lowering their heads in threat
again and again: geese
with a single gosling.
Where the high-speed
i.
A crane in a scrap metal yard
unclenches a great, magnetic claw.
Breast-shaped mounds of soil
sit two fields away from the pit,
a future fish pond.
Gulls glean in the plow’s dark wake.
A large, white dog follows
two boys along a dry creek
while we in our fast train
hurtle backwards over the sleepers
in their gravel beds.
ii.
A signal goes out
& we creep slowly through the night
so the driver can inspect the track.
“In the last thirty years,
Three hundred and sixty kills-
Mind you, kills, and I don’t keep track
Of the mutilated, the disabled, the living dead
Who fell before me on the tracks.”
He takes a sip of the whiskey,
A deep drag of the cigarette
Looks out through the window -
I see the glimmer of tears in his eyes.
Outside, the river roared as it gushed
The birds sang as they flew
Wind ran helter-skelter among the trees
The setting sun scattered golden light as it sank.
We were old friends, meeting after forty or more years,
This boyhood friend of mine
Who tagged behind me all the time