Sunday, March 05, 2006

 

From the Train

A couch sits among trees, dark leaves, fallen logs rotting,
a young boy stands on gravel and cinders holding a stick in his hand watching the train as it passes, through an underpass and a dune appears, a boy on a 3-wheeler approaching the top amid a cloud of sand, then a building and high brick walls crowned with barbed wire, a penitentiary, and again past trees, the junkyards with twisted rusty metal, ghosts floating in an abandoned steel mill, dark inside, the windows shattered, figures spray-painted on the decrepit walls, clusters of crabgrass, the black soil, old painted advertisements on a faded billboard, a solitary pile of concrete bricks stacked in the woods, sand and leaves, a treated wooden post half buried in the sand and grown over with coarse weeds, a jumble of ragged tires, a country lane, a stable and horses, a barn roof tilting and half gone, torn at the corners like a broken skeleton, a boy digging in the gravel, a dirt two-track leading nowhere, a rusted car laying prostrate on its side, an embankment built into the land and the bricks black with mold and white with crusty bubbling lime deposits, an old ruined tavern set on a tiny forgotten marina, the dock sinking back into the sea, another underpass reveals a pile of soaked clothing, and past where the land dips and rolls, a stream passes through, a metal corrugated silo and little houses with yards filled with tarp-covered cars, a hawk follows the air current over a razed farmland, steel powerline carriers stand in formation like giant stick men in a military review, shredded canvas tacked to a storage barn blowing in the wind, old pick-up sinking in the mud, a plastic cooler trapped in a pricker bramble, a mallard stands alone on a slick rock in the middle of a tiny lake, fruit groves in hibernation, through the screen of trees a shack stands on the scum, a river down below, the waters dark brown, sticks and leaves struggling and swirling, an unfinished house above, rotting planks nearby in the pines, a rusted bedspring snagged and impaled further back in the tangle of woods, a wheat field spreads out golden and silent, then great oaks and a mobile home, trash strewn all about, a junkyard behind with a wounded mechanical crane, its neck bent and the cockpit window cracked at one edge, a river rapids emptying into a pond covered with green algae, grass sprouting out on the shores like splinters, a patchwork of storage barn held up by wooden poles and steel girders, an irrigation ditch cutting across the land like a suture, dark low hills in the far distance, punctured and dented drums laying about where a pair of train tracks suddenly end, a grotto where a plastic lawn chair sits alone in a cluster of trees, the black lines between the corn rush along with the train as it passes, past a poor hamlet, under a regional highway, blueberry bushes rolling up and down the ground, a sandy path rises and drops out of sight, an old nag meandering over the mud chomping on grass, an apple grove where a fieldstone fireplace stands, choked with weeds, and below a blackberry patch and further a swamp lays in murky dim-lit obscurity.


- Ned Foskey

posted by Hog 1:04 PM