Train of Thought

by ava rahman

Sitting on the train, I watched

The man with his hat crooked, a book broken on his knee,

The woman with her eyes listless on her screen,

And the boy who got up on his knees and looked out,

To the trees, the houses, the drifts of snow,

Myriads of impressions slipping past the window

As the train barreled forward into space,

Pulling itself by its bootstraps,

Self generating its existence,

Or maybe affirming our own: 

We built the train.

But I did not build the train.

I could not march up to the front,

Push the driver out of the seat,

And pull it back from its own momentum.

I wouldn’t know which button to press. 

I sat on the train and I watched passengers leave like ghosts.

The man, the woman, and the child stepping off,

Trudging through lungfuls of snow,

The boy tripping as if unused to his legs,

While the train fled the station and went on, 

reaching the final stop where it was left desolate.

After that, did it continue on?

Was it willed into existence by our knowledge of it,

The tree falling in the woods and the Vale of Chamouni?

In my room, I wrote in the seat of my chair

And these words were boxcars built by others,

Sticking as condensation to the film of my mind,

Spinning webs into ephemeral space

That I neither saw nor was aware of.

Yet some hand moved and picked this one, this one, and that one,

And I settled for it, nodded, and though it was mine,

Writing something that created itself

With seemingly no movement at all.

Distance is huge between two horizons,

Crimson flame trying to warm cobalt ice, an impossible gap,

An attempt so violent to the self,

That bleaches every tenderness.

The jarring hearts themselves amazed and confounded,

Could not understand how a one-way road could bifurcate

Into two dead ends.

They gaze and gaze longer, but no sails are set.

The mirage afar shivering in their vain hopes

Refuses to come alive.

Flood begins to attack the shore.

Stiff feet drenched and heavy like boulders,

Limbs untended swinging in the blaring wind,

Hair wet and adhesive to their cheeks and necks,

They decide, in the end, to forsake the solid ground.

One tentative inch is enough;

The rest expands in a blink.

When they dock the desolate isle,

False dreams burst on the pins of sharp discrepancy.

They cannot believe that they have never noticed

Even evergreen has shriveled grey;

Bluebirds fluttering crippled wings have fallen under haphazard hail;

The rich juice of mulberries

Have now been seared into the bitter rain of May.

No tears could compete with the flood

That has silently mounted into a deluge that inundates

All insidious delusions.

It would be the end of a misguided story

Of flimsy shards residing in a cracked, embellished casket.