The wristwatch of Casey Jones

or,

how the earth learned to tell time


Like the first blood to flow
through the delta’d veins
of a giant slumbering dream:
the first trains

carried prayers—
let me never be found
to be falling down—cannonball
between far-flung towns;

afternoon could be so wide
it gave no sign
of breaking;
before we had watches

nights be so unbroken
we knew no more
than earth knew
what course our globe was taking.

The engineer
of the iron horse
rode high behind
the sweeping pilot,

into the darkness
his six-pipe whistle like Orpheus
sounded; we set our watches
by it.

In loco moveri:
Aristotle’s phrase, describing movement
by change of position
in space;

in time
we call it progress,
unreeling a schedule clear
to the horizon-crease,

and up the skies:
Casey Jones
always got her there on the
advertised,

outbellowed cows
to clear the track. His whistle,
familiar Tennessee to Mississippi,
began softly,

rose, then doubled back
to a whisper. His own watch
stopped at the time of
impact

Skull crushed,
the coroner said,
his right arm
sundered.

Suddenly,
at 3:52 AM,
the 30th of April,
1900.

Reports begin to sound
both too much
and not enough like strings of
numbers.

Ole 382 approached
the town of Vaughan;
26, 72, and 83
waited on the siding

but a scorpion tail
of four cars curled
onto the main line;
a flagman

at 3,000 feet
went by unseen or unheeded,
flares at 800, 500,
at eighty

miles per hour,
the airbrake and whistle as Casey
glimpsed the No 83’s tail
just three hundred feet shy.

The fireman,
who at his engineer’s urging
jumped to safety
remembers Casey

quite happy
at the progress The New Orleans Special
Fast Mail Train was making:
making up time

shoveling on coal
pouring on steam Casey said,
“old girl’s got her dancing
slippers on tonight”

Not a passenger was hurt.
The engine later was repaired.
Only the good engineer and
his time-piece

stopped;
in the embankment
on the track’s
east side

the imprint of the headlight,
boiler, and wheels
were visible each to the spoke;
and when these disappeared,

corn,
scattered by the wreck,
grew, each summer, for years
in the memory of the nearby fields.

Invocation

Mike Fink. John Henry. Paul Bunyan. Casey Jones.

As though the wilderness in which these names forged their meanings has now grown

back

over the names impenetrably obscuring paths once cleared by salted rivers of sweat;

or perhaps

the wilderness is all disappeared? Wooded groves which harbored heroes now part,

reveal

horizons, and no figure larger than ordinary; no monsters in the rocky, fjord-like

crenellations

of the coast: sea heaves its sighs and strums its finger along the tight drums of

the rocks,

a tune that summoned the male muses, once, these waves that break their own

hearts.

Unfinished

Titanomachiopolis



A true journey
of the imagination
into the under-
world of the foundry
a drilling music,
a molding music
for those who hear it:
for those who hear it
are changed.

The song: to hear it is
a crossing of the river
at the level of the river:
without the highstrung
bridge, the tunnel
boring obscurity.
There is no tuning out
the river once heard,
crouched over in all
its cold and tumult.
Your attention
Is fallen in the river,
neither will you be permitted
to return.

“What I saw when I arrived
was not protest songs
but the shadows of empty
factories and in those
factories and in their
shadows were a
whole lot of people struggling.”

On the sullen
bulks of islands—
off the shore of time—
what is being made
has pieces larger than you,
rivets longer than your body,
gears wider than your mind.
This is the song of the machine
that coins machines.
It is larger than your ears;
you must hear in parts.

In the subway car, the bodies,
Barely contained,
emenate in flickers like
the stars in space.
An old biddy
looking for the bingo game
is alone in the back of a church:
our lady of unnamed places.
Tell me mother
is there no way
to get from here
to Brooklyn
without the aid of car
or train? Like the human
fly latched on to the vertical
side of a building,
vulnerable, dizzy,
I feel the boundaries of
my animal body:
the muscle span,
the fragile skin,
the world is dark.

The cars on the bridge
drive on metal tracks.
Latched on to the vertical
side of the city, it seems
purchaseless steele,
an impossibly large
mistake: black grease
in person-sized smears
in places a window-washer
cannot reach,
so this is what it must be like
to be a neuron
with no conception of the brain:
the subway cars
drive themselves
down the nightmare tunnels
screaming in pain.

When the Titans gave birth
to Zeus, when his brothers
and sisters were vomited
onto the earth,
I imagine Cronos felt
helpless.
These children had changed
what it meant to be a god.