lived with two or three brothers
in a railroad rooming house.
I’ve seen them dancing on the porch,
unbelievable as ghosts —
barefoot in overalls,
and one of them would plink and pluck
a banjo, forgoing melody
for the more mysterious sense of sound.
That house is years away in time —
it was said the brothers shared a wife.
By the end, though, they lived in public housing
without a porch and kept indoors.
Now all of them are gone from the earth.
There was no skill in the work we did,
the work, at least, didn’t ask it —
clattering down through the warehouse
with iron-wheeled ancient carts
to drag them loaded back to the dock
where the only twentieth-century fact —
a straight-box truck — waited
for loading. We’d do it again and again
until all seven trucks were gone
to the country stores which now themselves
are gone: Bottoms’s, Pottsville, Jennings’s,
Craintown, Redtop,
even the little towns have gone.
But some of the men gave skill to the work,
simply by enjoying it,
the rhythm and repetition, and then
they’d interrupt it. Freddie would take
it out around midday and squint
with his good one through the glass and say,
let’s see if I see dinnertime,
and then in the afternoon he’d fish
it out again and say, I believe
I see it, five o’clock! — holding
the eye before him like a lantern,
as though he were leading us from darkness.
CHAPEL ON THE WAY TO HOBO TOWN
One summer Belcher’s machine shop
over by the railroad tracks
blew up and burned to the ground.
It was a long, low, shambling place
and round — it looked like a feed trough
turned upside down with a square front
and the name over a sliding door
with corrugated metal siding;
the whole thing had been silver once.
The morning after it burned we rode
our bikes over there to watch the smoke
uncoil and disappear. I suppose
we were amazed by such destruction,
how sudden it could be and how
the shop no longer had a form.
We figured Lonnie Belcher, a boy
we knew from school though he was older,
would become a hero for being close
to all of this — his grandfather
and a strange, unsteady uncle ran
the shop. Lonnie had been the one
who’d told us about Hobo Town,
which was a few miles down the tracks
and farther down a spur that ran
a ways and ended in the woods.
It was decided, then, that since
we’d seen the blown-up shop and that
had made us brave, we might as well
continue on to Hobo Town.
In single file we clattered down
the tracks; there were three or four of us,
our wheels rattled over the ties,
the smell of creosote and pitch
was thick and every little while
we’d stop and listen to the rails
to see if there was any singing.
Beyond the brief freight-yard, we came
to a shack that one time might have been
for a switchman. We looked in the doorway and saw
a dirty magazine that was torn
in pieces, but a page had been hung
on a nail in the plank wall — it was strange
to see her there, a decoration,
but she, the woman on the page,
was someone’s favorite; she’d been chosen,
her image was elevated, and now
with sunlight on her, the altar shone.
Faith is difficult to define,
but most of us are willing to say
something we don’t quite know must come before
ourselves, something
that isn’t our idea yet
we hold it higher up and think
it is the symbol of a secret.
We found
