Sunday, June 1, 2014

from JAMES CERVANTES:


Learning


Here comes the ferrocarril,
announcing itself with a rude trumpet,

the iron horse and its iron carriage
weighing on rails, the earth, and the body.

But that is not what is out there a few
hundred yards away, in Mexico,

and seventy years removed
from the image in a small head

and a small body that feels the weight
rumbling a stone's throw from the house.

We must have been close by the rail yard
because the heaviness stills and a soft

coupling of cars begins. A magnolia
couples with the face of mother,

two halves of a house with a steel ball
that rolls down its central hallway, curtains

blowing outward and a tin roof
alive with rain, gravel with rock with rail

until ghost cars couple silently
beyond the vanishing point where

the train disappeared and the engine
will come into view again.


--James Cervantes

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