American Fractal

The Body

15 The Body in the dream I wake to a poem about trains what it is that insists that crawls clamors the windowpane clasped shut against a wind outside bare branches in a dry heave & I rise over the swelling resolution not to rise I rise consider the light switch consider the electric blanket warmth I rise instead go to the window which is no longer a window but a box full of moonlight & down there in the meadow just a handful of starspecks in the foxglove her hair is blue grass & the first thing I think of are the wet walls of howe caverns that tourist trap back east the pipe organ the bridal altar the river styx stalactites & stalagmites fusing the slow settle of limestone bicarbonate a blind bat on a billboard unfurling leather wings unfurling night unleashing a gust of supersonic transience an old dog’s call to supper twenty miles to go fifteen get your wallet ready & there it is again the unmistakable whistle 16 the bleating the bleeding the letting off of steam & she’s by the tracks with something in her hands a silver shining thing & through the silent distance through the square hole in my bedroom wall I know there’s nothing left to call it but hope though it’s just a quarter a nickel a dime general washington’s hope your twenty-five cents worth of hope a handful of gum balls a plastic egg full of costume jewelry that would stain a tiny finger green it’s just the sedimentary the sentimental dream token hope the hope you go to hell the hope you forgive me the hope you remember to hope at least love & she sets it down on the far track as if dropping her hope into the cool slot of a jukebox the low clink clambers up from inside my throat as she steps over both tracks over the shimmering shining thing over the glittering fluttering tumbling turning thing now lifting at its edges the thing that’s always more than whatever it is because there’s the whistle 17 again the rumble a distant thunder because the past can’t hold the future the present rumbles on five miles almost there hush now it sweeps past two geometric lines that never touch & there’s the lamplight the steamstack the hot metal glow & at her heels this unnameable sadness this burden the eternal space there between the train’s first passing & the wind that follows a second later to wake the body from its only available dream ...