TRAIN WHISTLE

TRAIN WHISTLE

Train whistle then the rush of surf from its wheels on the track

as if it were hauling an ocean somewhere.

Graffiti from North Carolina on tour, one long art gallery

spray bombed by underground American artists

on its boxcars and tankers. When I stopped at the crossbars,

driving cab, I always wished I could publish

a poem like that, one line coupled to another

as if our metaphors were holding hands at a barn dance.

Then on to pick up the next fare as if you were cruising

the red light district for a working girl who called

without a return address, mind-reading doorways in distress

as if you were ambiguously oracular about where you were going.

More sedentary now, the crackheads trust me less

about where I dropped them off and picked them up

than they used to when they knew I had taken

an unspoken street vow of silence like a vehicular priest

who confessed everybody for their indefensible humanity,

on his way to somewhere else that was seldom paradise

with its feet on the ground like a corporate pharmaceutical

wallowing in its own starmud as if someone

had just thrown the shepherd moons of its pearls

before real swine, sometimes, who blackened the reputation

of the death mask they wore as if Zorro were a dealer

fencing with the delusions of Don Quixote tilting at windmills

he mistook for prayer wheels. You don’t know whether

to be mad or sad, or just as bad as the fools that milk

the wrong fang of the snake they’re buying the antidote from.

There’s more loneliness in moving than there is in sitting still.

This road of ghosts is dotted with tasteless pit stops

like a starmap with nuclear, attention-getting

big city magnitudes of light on all night outblazing the stars

like a ferryman on a graveyard shift who’s trying

to stay awake in the wheelhouse by the pilot light he’s been given to go by.

Coffee and cigarettes please, in the snowblind glare

of a lap top that’s got a long, hard drive ahead of it

I play like a keyboard on its knees that’s got

no idea of how to get there from here before it invariably does

through a labyrinth of cul de sacs and train crossings

that don’t attract as many Sufis as they used to

when I was dancing my way deeper into my homelessness

for shelter against the white noise life was humming to me

as I watched the deaf grooving like water snakes to flute-music.

Now I take long, dark walks along the Tay River

where I’m least likely to meet anyone coming my way

as I watch the stars flicker in the river like lures

on the fishing hook of the moon trying to catch the big one

like the legend on a starmap it never fails to throw back

into the sea of tranquillity its awareness jumped from

like a northern pike that arises from the bottom up

like a covert insight into the nature of life eyeing

what’s inspired it to strike like the imagination of a madman

caught a moment in his own highbeams like the ghost

of a white-tailed buck leaping out of the headlights

like enlightenment with no intention of adding itself

to the pageant of roadkill along the back roads

of the shadows of lost sheep in the shepherdless valleys of death.

See how I wrote that like a train passing through town

in the dead of the night like a found poem

I’ve spliced together like the neurons of railroad lines

from all over North America like delinquents with winged heels

rising like waterbirds from a million weak threads

of a river system bound into the strong rope of a spinal cord

you can climb up to heaven on like a fuse or the lifelines

rooted in the palm of your hand like a crosswalk beginning to flower

with zodiacal traffic signs because the mindstream flows

horizontally onward like an egalitarian that will come to harmony progressively

like water seeking its own equilibrium from the same sea of awareness,

each at the level of the thresholds they’ve crossed

like a sword dance with a waterclock that’s always on time

as if it were running on sundials with alarmist hour hands.

Bad dream grammar, perhaps. But I bet there’s

a poet-cabdriver in North Carolina with the same

mad picture music in his heart who understands perfectly

the denaturing of creative humanity from his art

isn’t a short cut to that right side of the tracks no one’s ever

been reincarnated on like the side of a bone box

that didn’t express itself demonically like an exorcism

blessing the empty hearses of dead air in the freight cars

with nothing written on them as if some nihilistic orthodoxy

had freshly painted over the hunting magic

of artistic Neanderthals scarred indelibly

by shamanistic spit paintings of genius with blood

like red ochre and night like soot in the mouths

of their lanterns waiting for the lights to change

from the false dawns of fake songbirds in the sun

to the mystic moonrise in the occult guild halls

of howling bush wolves contemporaneously

packing in the dark like the solos of nightbirds

echoing across the lake like the longing

of an unanswerable response to the sublimity of why

we must live, love, desire and die as we do, written on the fly

like the linear A of inchoate thought trains of subversive water and fire,

hissing like spray bombs of scalded metal whenever we come to a full stop.

PATRICK WHITE