Wild Goose Poetry Review, No 34, Spring 2018
VOICE IN THE DARK
Even before I wake I hear the Santa Fe-Pacific,
its line of steel containers and trolling boxcars,
track-rattling wrought-iron clatter and plaintive horn bursts
across bucolic Midwest, through Santa Rosa, then off,
the last of ash, box-elder, blue trillium, down 54, nothing
but nothing, sheer desert, whistling over jet-black trestles,
slowing only for one Las Cruces crossing-grade before El Paso,
borderland, wind its voice in the dark, slapping my window,
at clapboard-box shelters on American Ave., Juárez tarpaper shacks.
a vagrant wind for all others, like lieder, lines of words,
naked and alone, as we would always wish them,
with no other place to go but home.
Wild Goose Poetry Review 