Dear friends,
I’m taking time off. Everyone needs time off, I’d say. In the meantime, here’s a little prose poem for you.
The Train
The train would come by twice a day on the other side of the lake, the mournful whistle of distance and longing. Only a quarter mile away, but across water seems farther. The train quit coming, the tracks grew over, the train station torn down. I miss the regular train, the smooth running on tracks. The old myth of the 50s. It was the Pere Marquette, up from Chicago. I still call it that, but really it had been absorbed by the C & O Railway years before. I choose the names I love, the hint of French, the distance. The children swim across the lake every summer. It feels like the ocean if you’re seven. If you swim it for the first time. You want mystery, a far shore. You’d like a train over there, its heavy low danger passing you by.