Tracking the Midwestern Train Delays

1.

The train walking Manhattan to Chicago, west of where I lost my sleep.


2.

Autumn arrives tonight, late—my pillow,  part of the turning leaves.


3.

I try to force sleep: the pillow tosses in my arms.


4.

Autumn drama—I eat meatballs discovered in the bushes by Tony Soprano.


5.

Midnight to 4 a.m. the moon awake in my bed.


6.

Train following a family of power lines to Chicago, train moving west— trees, east.


7.

The train enters morning; moon still on the windows.


8.

Spring rain—how else do you know where the geese have been.


9.

Every day discovering the souls of the shower curtain, years away, in the spring mirror.


10.

The alarm clock keeps counting while I sleep—tomorrow it will sleep while I count.


11.

Night with nothing in it—moon healing in the daddy longlegs.


12.

Crossing the street, I lose track of the falling snow.


13.

Winter kindling—the deer vanish another mile from the sun.


14.

Emulating road signs—their songs, their already forgotten clarity.


15.

No longer as tall as you, wading through the Cedar River.


16.

Horses gathered on the thinning grass, the barn with a hole in its side.


17.

Tuesday insomnia—claws raking behind the walls: no more rain, perhaps.


18.

Sky stays in the grass from Albany to Cedar Rapids; from Cedar Rapids to Albany the sky back inside my head.


19.

The all-night cricket rubbing its antennae to get into my room—8 a.m. arrives, the green peeling from the door.


20.

An afternoon of new leaves—the fawn bleeding where a sunflower slept.


21.

Ivanhoe, Minnesota—battleclouds crossing the state line: Granite Falls, I’ll take this rain east, in my coat.


22.

Lost in the driveway, last year, looking for the fishes in an oil slick.


23.

DeToi’s Family Restaurant—the manager pulls the napkins, also, from the ground.


24.

The first worries of March—whether or not the daddy longlegs will bloom.


25.

Summer evening: the mosquitoes learn another bite of skin.


26.

Driving to Minneapolis and on to Sioux Falls—the sky loses a cloud each time I look in the rear view mirror.


27.

The moon north of Chicago, accessible only by the roads you made as a forgotten child.


28.

South Dakota prairie—how many crossing in the cattle truck the sky comes from.


29.

Trains wander on the moon, looking for where they might have abandoned us.


30.

A ladybug stayed on the car window three days through Iowa and Minnesota and drowned there in a pellet of prairie rain.