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The Switching/Yard
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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29 The Switching/Yard 2 giant sleeping cranes, nothing as lonely as a crane not working: relic with its head bowed in the brokenness of a highway dream. Crossbar signal/arm over the road with red light eyes: we’re coming. Rolling out of Toronto with a derailment in Capreol— 14 cars off the track, but we’re headed into it, I’m riding the dirt line to Winnipeg, where my birth father is deeper than the Assiniboine and wider than the Red River Valley, he’s the whole province of Manitoba. Lines of indigenous pines otherworldly now because this is my country, I’m the indigenous one, ghost explorer returning, looking for blood. Moving again, just crossed the highway outside of Wahago. 11:30 pm and the sky’s blue-dark with the trees going back to their night souls— Is anyone else on this train tonight looking for ghosts? From this 3 × 4 window I see underpass/ underpass/deserted road/so close to hillsides we are inside the land. Industrial construction yard, lines and lines of tracks— The VIA Rail steward: If you look here, you’ll find the train #==== here’s the name of each car. Mine is 111 Bliss. Riding north of Thunder Bay to Winnipeg, past the green green of Saskatchewan to the prairies of Manitoba, nothing but fields of dirtgrass for miles. My father’s father was here—and in some piece of dirt, some line of crossing, the wind will whip up into the Manitoba field-long clouds where the Red River meets the union hall, where miners and machinists said, here. Here, where a switch can be made out of a willow, 30 where a switch can rise from dirt. If I can stand in the crosscut of bodies that made my father, that grew him hard into a crosschecking fighter, I will have found blood. There is no peace like the road at night, until the whistle spills its fat long blare— must be coming up on a town. Tree branches hit the side of the train, a band of light coats the trees in the distance in the secret life of quonset hut/quonset hut/ all this industry and dreaming, people’s lives on these dark patches of land—are they up late worrying about losing? Their job, their minds, their families? We are all so separate with the same lives. The train shaking me home to no father I know: right wing for the Hornets/Maple Leafs/Rangers— —his steps, my steps. I can’t see him/hear him/touch him but I can walk the ground, step hard: Was there a white frame house? A woman, your mother, washing clothes by the Red River? Are these the overalls touched by your skin? The ground you walked then two bodies slammed together one night in Pittsburgh and I was made, and in the making the blood ran? Who made your green piercing eyes that bore through me with aliveness/ In this ghost land, lights show up in trees, a band of light in the sky, a different look every 20 yards, the change of it all. House on the hill with 5 lights on, the kind of house that always has porch lights burning— [3.234.177.119] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:26 GMT) 31 there’s a steadiness out here that I love, a regularity I don’t know. Sudden rise of land and a highway tunnel. Sign: Megalots—160 ft deep and city lampposts sprout like alien antennae. The train stopping now, 3 cars unhitched— left in the yard for pickup. Where is that one sweep of wind where I’ll find the switching/yard: this train and that, those who made you, and, in that distant but bloody kingdom way—me, so I can stand and say, here. Here where Polish immigrants set their stake: where the prairie met the working stiff and you were born. Shut up in this compartment, I am the small ghost— light shines in the window from a signal, shooting the whole traincar bloody red. Tomorrow in the open I will be legion— you will see me bleeding from every pore, a woman in the switching/yard. ...