One day I’ll write without routine without coffee in the chill before the sun. I won’t need to
capture that liminal, surely there’s a better word to describe the between the dull civil twilight
and the explosion of the sun’s entrance. One day I’ll write without lists in threes, rhetorical
repetitions, to note the vibrant colors of the sun setting like the burning leaves falling in my
heart. That day I’ll put it all in a boat with a salt fish prayer like the Japanese monks who shove
off for the pure land.
Today I have to catch the train. On the tracks we’re high enough that the town looks like a
postcard, quiet like a blanket, tucked in from the frost patching roofs and icing car windows.
Real life is: 1) so cold it sticks to the tracks like a tongue to a flagpole; 2) so transient it passes by
the old man sleeping on the bench; 3) so ephemeral it evaporates like a chilled breath in the dead
of November.
The train down the tracks starts toward us against the blank cold of the morning. The tracks are
removed from town, are removing us, are moving under the train’s heat.
Everyone waiting dresses in grays and blacks, in fabrics of wool, synthetics, herringbone,
kashmere, suited for the politics of the office that sucks us out of the context of our loves.
People seem distant brushing past with a thousand yard stares into the empty promises of their
apps. Delusions and distractions from disappointment. Anything against this empty wind of the
passing train that leaves death at the vanishing point where the tracks unparallel and blend gray
rail bed to gray morning in endless sprawl of the Turnpike State.
In the Dylan song of creation where no one who sees my face lives, two men talk, waiting for
spring while the train smokes down the track. You make shoes and go barefoot.
They call it good. They look into the past of songs made by moonlight streams.
Creation drives the troubadour like anyone else. The people dive into their apps to experience it.
They’ve shunned the troubadour, the vagabond, the postcard artist.
To find it, they’ve abandoned the streams, the leaves, the falls as if it were everyday, as if
nothing new happened under the sun, as if the answer is in a coded line.
How sweet it is to lose one’s self in a strand of spruce low on a mountain’s ridge in the mid
morning sunlight far between the valley and the peak for the sake of orange needles numerous as
the stars. To abandon the postcard town and its toy train. To dive down the gorge on the other
side to be swept away by rapids through ravines out to sea.
Dave Nash (he/him) listens to jazz sampled by hip-hop hits while he types. Dave is the Non-Fiction Editor at Five South Magazine. His work appears in places like Jake, Atlantic Northeast, South Florida Poetry Journal, Hooghly Review, miniMag, Roi Faineant Press, Thriving Writers Magazine, and Boats Against the Current. You can follow him @davenashlit1.
Really lovely Dave. Thanks for posting this.