Station To Station

Trains

My first spoken words were “boxcar”,
“cattle car”, “oil tanker”, “caboose.”
Although I could not tell time,
I knew when to expect the trains to pass.
Long before the crunch of steel wheels
were constant heartbeats, then gone,
I imagined their destinations.
I believed trains went where geese went,
and rain clouds were formed by coal tenders.
I knew the names of companies from boxcars
as they sped by like flash cards.
The sleek metal passenger cars
were Flash Gordon rocket ships
and the crows that followed them
could have been the Winged Men of Cloud City.