#evening train

[jt1674]

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[nobeerreviews]

It doesn’t matter how many times you leave, it will always hurt to come back and remember what you once had and who you once were. Then it will hurt just as much to leave again, and so it goes over and over again. Once you’ve started to leave, you will run your whole life.

-- Charlotte Eriksson

[nikolamga]

[wordscanbeenough]

I must still / grow in the dark like a root / not ready, not ready at all.

Denise Levertov, from "Eye Mask", Evening Train

[wordscanbeenough]

In this dark I rest, / unready for the light which dawns / day after day, / eager to be shared.

Denise Levertov, from "Eye Mask", Evening Train

[wordscanbeenough]

All my life hoping: having to hope / because decades brought no reassurances.

Denise Levertov, from "Hoping", Evening Train

[poem-today]

A poem by Tom Clark

Evening Train

Train whistle in cold January night down by the water lonesome sound  from a long way off amid memory forest Harlem Avenue 1947 or 1948 late  upstairs in the exile bedroom at grandparents' house across from the house of the mysterious famous gangster

in the dark under the attic rafters hour after hour imagining a meaning to fit the brilliant silvery word Zephyr

Tom Clark (1941-2018)

Image: Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Zephyr streamliner pulling out of Union Station, Chicago (photo by Jack Delano, February 1943).

More poems by Tom Clark are available on the Poetry Foundation site and on the Poem Hunter site.

Tom Clark’s fascinating and extensive blogspot is available here.

Tom Clark writes:

Trains were a big deal for me as a kid. 

During my childhood railroading was in its heyday and Chicago was the hub. Every Saturday morning I got up early and took the C & NW train downtown, then explored one of the big railroad stations. There were seven major stations in Chicago at that time, all quite busy. There was an obscure thrill in the arrival of a train from faraway, in wintertime encrusted with the grimy ice deposits of many exotic faraway states. Those great dirty ice chunks were nuggets of romance from an age of gold and iron and steel that was always going on in a remote, marvelously unreachable other dimension ... a climactic moment of my prosaic youth occurred in Union Station, Chicago when the driver of a Burlington Zephyr received me up into the cab of his train (O the wonder!) and allowed me to stand there at his side for the run out past the switching yards to what was at that time still open country, at the brink of the vast western prairie.