Next Witness, and: Sunset Limited

Next Witness

He surged through the temple before touchknew my touch, bowed me beneath his graygreen leagues. My want, not my want? Noone asked.

Bad myth: hair my main glory, my prongedpulse to the sea, golden, hauling him in.Then the jealous goddess caught mein an eeled shriek, my head turned soft-

bellied nest. Of course I’d prayed tomaul each gaze with a hiss.Then thought I saw gods drippingfrom the oaks, mushrooms, and lichens

extending their fat shelves.I sit in the cemetery with the monolithswho’ve made shields of me.They’ve tried to split me

into something they could ride:feathered, angelic, whitewith graceful haunches, or masculine,broad-shouldered and saddled. And you—

when you look at me—Will your throat cinch?Will you sprout into stone and erode?

Sunset Limited

I

After the wreck, they drove me downwhere the charred cars lay stackedby the highway’s wayside. Look, girl.Seagulls bobbed and plunged at loosedsaltines. Frog calls blistered in the background.There must have been stretchers brought,helicopters circling in huntress swarms,radioed calls to tote the dead away.The train that pummels off into bayou,that’s all Momma drawn to the bogs,no mind to her ribs, steel and bowed,pregnant with passengers. She thinksshe’s a gilled fortress. Her ironshudders and shouts through the pines.A woman is neither train nor wreck,but he was the barge in fog that senther track akimbo? No. Not barge, notman. A girl is neither track nor last halt.

II

I got to drive that train once.Sat on the conductor’s lap. I guess it was less driving,more pulling a string to letthe whistle croon long-loud.He’d pulled on his jumpsuitthat hazed September morning,when the sky still hung pitch,to help the bog-drenched,the drowned, shaken bodiesfrom the flaming Canot. The train,later: steel split under the weightof its own derailment, passengersall dispersed, the small crookof bayou still speckled with oil.Today you called me a trainwreck. Maybe I am morelike the girl I was, sittingin your conductor’s lap,the view of my own sunsetlimited. I have never been a train.