Everyone Loves a Train

Every kid loves a train, but in DeKalb I think every adult hates them. Our day-to-day life is really dominated by trains, but so common place we ignore them. Wanted to relay 4 poems tonight about the railway in our community. A “train set”.

February 23, 2006 (DeKalb).
They say eighty-one trains come through this town everyday. And I’ve had a front row seat for 79 of them. Blaring, graffiteed elephants stampeding single file. One herd passes while another waits around the corner to stop me in my tracks. Big, loud, and plenty, but I don’t remember seeing a single one of them. Is it the proverbial pachyderm in the middle of the room? No. I’m a poacher sawing the tusks off the Substantial. Carving ivory trinkets while I wait it for it to pass.
2-23-06

The second focuses on the trolley tracks that were unearthed in front of our house in 2001 during street repair in Sycamore. My then-5 year old daughter researched it at the library. “The DeKalb-Sycamore Electric Traction Company began offering trolley rides between the two towns in 1902. There were two cars which began service at 6:30 a.m. and ended at midnight. The route ran from the Normal School (where Altgeld Hall is at Northern) …and ended at the DeKalb County Courthouse. One could purchase a one-way trip for 10 cents. The trolley ended service in 1924. Some cited the increasing popularity of automobiles and paved roads as the cause. There was also a trolley service between DeKalb and Aurora from 1910 to 1916.”

Restless.
Inside this house at 3:24 a.m. I hear my five year-old’s heavy breathing in the other room. Her toss and roll under the comforter. My wife murmurs something in her sleep and my son takes another hourly union break from his slumber. His left arm now tangled in his pajamas. We’re a restless group, even at rest.

Outside this house workers have torn up the streets. The asphalt has been folded back and the concrete slabs recline on my neighbor’s lawn. And in this excavation a set of railroad tracks has been uncovered.

In my insomnia I slip on my shoes, leave the front door and grope in the sand and rocks to find those tracks. ‘Cause here in the moonlight I’m almost sure these cold rails lead somewhere. Maybe to a town where you don’t have to just pray for comfort for widows, but where you can pray for healing. And, for the dead to rise.
4-06-01

The last two poems focus on the interruption of a Train. Sometimes in DeKalb a two block trip from where I work to the P.O. can, if I hit it right, be a 45 minute affair. Makes one wonder why trains are so prominent as metaphors for “deliverance” in slave spirituals!

Prophet (DeKalb, May 11).
Freight train blowing and bellowing in the middle of town. Disrupting our schools, our 10am services, keeping us up at night. Sure, you might be Gabriel’s horn, or the moan of the Passover Angel, but you best shut your mouth ‘cause we got real work to do around here. Besides if there was anything worth saying, we would’ve already said it. And, anyways, we knew you when you was a kid and nobody liked you much then either. So, get back in line or get yourself run out of town on a rail.
5-11-02

A Train (DeKalb, April 15).
In the late afternoon,
Ghost whistle calling
Through the neighborhoods, a train.
Who’ll come? Who?

Distant. Underneath the cars and trucks,
And the doors opening and closing,
And the polite conversations, a train.
Who’ll come? Who?

My dad says, “I s’pose…
If you don’t keep busy,
You start thinking lots of things.”
And in the quiet, a train.
Who’ll come? Who?

In the late afternoon,
For those who hear,
And for those who are thirsty,
And for those who wish, a train.
Who’ll come? Who?

4-15-02