Train Manifesto

On Tully's deck, looking over autumn city night, the lights, the lake, the Oquirrhs, a drift of slim clouds, final drift of day, for some the first day of life, for some the last, the last beauty, the last threshold, and for Tully and me, we ask what to do with it, and then we hear the train.  A train passing through, we listen to the echo, inspired, dream the beginning of things, where things begin, the original night, and toward this we go into some kind of pulse, some kind of blue shadow, as in blue night, blue skin, blues singer.  Into song, following lines, a track to be measured, spoken of, a stretch along the way, a map through the country, crisscross chant and dream aboriginal. We take the dog.

It's a quiet night before the first snow, a fifteen minute stroll from Tully's house to the railroad crossing, four tracks, one street lamp, the capital building lighting the hilltop east, the air damp with still.  Across the road is a mattress factory, on this side the railroad maintenance yard, parked work trucks saturated in oil, a shopping cart tipped in the dirt by the tracks, the city is sleepy, lonely, and Tully, dreaming, speaks to the dog and she sits.  Something's up with Tully, the whites of his eyes bend to other places. He stands on the tracks.  Landscapes widen and blur.  Blue Night, a lovely title for the soundtrack, something Tully could play on the guitar.          

       "It makes sense," Tully says, and kneels beside the dog, the dog licking his mouth.  

        I don’t know what makes sense, but there you have it.  He’s standing on the tracks, we hear the train, the engine's light bobbing through black horizon.   

I tell Tully he should get his ass off the tracks. Tully drops his arms, steps beside me.  We wait for the train, watch as it eases through the crossing and halts, blocking the road, sixty flatbeds and tanker cars, the stop signal flashing, the train humming and rocking. Tully rocks with it, speaks of his parents, growing older each.  He speaks of his wife, they are going through a thing, he’s confused.  

       I think about what it would be to lie under the train while it's moving.  I’d like to ask Tully to lie under the train with me, wonder would it mean, to lie below a moving freighter. I feel liberated imagining Tully crossing the tracks to a Union Pacific boxcar, placing his hands on the cold steel slider, bowing his head in some kind of trance, slowly he lowers himself to the ground, and then, more clumsy than a person needs to be, he crawls between the wheels, struggles over the tracks and finds a place to rest between them. Under the train and lost to the shadows, I imagine Tully staring at the grim under-bottom of a tanker.  If this were to be, his dog would go crazy on the end of the leash, and when the train started to roll she'd give chase, pulling the world behind her.   The train would pass and disappear as trains are meant to do, but would Tully be okay?  Would I?  This is always the question: how far to push in search of fresh meaning, how deep into blue before it turns to sacrifice?

Beauty train. Beauty.  Bellus, fair, bonus, good.  Beatus, to bear, to bless.  To believe.  To hold dear.  To become train.  Anatomy of life, fluid mind, lights and shadows flicker past boundaries, near perfection, love. Lethargy of sleep, locomotive per chance. What is blessed. Intoxicate by root, baptize by smoke, blessed be thy name, train, the murmur swift as light, rolling across this tragic land.


Every city in the world has a train story.  Salt Lake City has a story.  The trains made it easier for the Saints.  Before the trains the Saints crossed the great plains in wagons, and at one point they pushed handcarts up steep pitted trails.  The carts more often than not fell apart well before the group made it to the Salt Lake valley, and when they did the people carried what they could on their backs, in their pockets, in their arms.  Through bitchwork and sickness, the Saints pilgrimaged for the Holy Land and some died in the crossing and those who didn't were met at the pass by Elders and they were led into town in a parade, heroes all.  They were happy heroes. They were happy together. In those days the Saints drank wine in celebration and they celebrated their new home, and they bowed in reverence and prayed for the living, yes, and for the loved ones buried along the trail.  They were strong, and at their core, they were deeply saddened and bereft.  
      When track was laid across the plains the Saints came into the valley on trains, and that changed everything.  For the Mormons, the trains marked the beginning of the end of their wild crazy romp with nature, and the people, now settled and under the strict hand of a father, grew tame. And tame, like all common people before them, they decided it best to tame things, just as all of us try to tame, and they dammed the rivers, just as all of us dam rivers, they warned against the dangers of curiosity, just as all of us are afraid, and they poured good liquor to the ground.  Of course, try as anyone might, the wild can never be tamed, and to this day, as most of us are numb to the sensuous earth, there are more than a few Mormons with that old raging native river in their blood. You can see it in their eyes, you can hear it in the frosty edge of their song.   

Trains, of course, brought the gentiles, the drinkers and the poets, the gamblers and the prostitutes, the artists and the actors and the thieves, the musicians and the melancholic, those who dance in sorrow on flat toes, my people, people of the birds, the pagan mystics, the inebriated visionaries, my aunts, my sisters, my mother who, like the wild Mormon, walks the hills barefoot and bares her thin breasts to the wind.

As always, there are historical congruences, parallel lines and crossings.  While Brigham Young was building his roads and the great temple on the valley floor, Thoreau hid in the eastern trees, walked the woods and listened to the trains choking the hills, carrying cargos of lumber westward. The night is black, and Thoreau, an abolitionist, said, "I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock. . . ."  "Life consists with wildness," he said.  "The most alive is the wildest."  On the daylight side, Brigham Young, a man of high noon morality, in an l859 discourse on slavery, characterized the Africans as descendents of Cain, as "uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind." Young was not alone among evangelicals or secularists in his belief that black was wild and wild was bad. What Young had somehow ignored or failed to understand was that Joseph Smith was the most wild, and every bit as black as he was white.   

A century later while the Mormon leader Ezra Taft Benson boarded a train to Washington D.C. with an endorsement for the John Birch Society, in San Francisco Allen Ginsberg sat with Jack Kerouac in the veil of darkened railyard, the tracks entangled in mummied roots, the rusted box cars symbol of industrialization and bomb, and beside the tracks Ginsberg saw a sunflower poised against the sunset, remembered Blake's sunflower, that self-same sunflower that appeared to him as he masturbated on a bed by the open window in a New York City apartment while reading Blake, and with his prick in his hand he entered a vision and heard a voice that he described as "unforgetable because it was like God had a human voice, with all the infinite tenderness and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son."   

Kerouac himself worked the rails to a fine tragic inebriation, steam everywhere flocked up by winds, world swirling, early morning train to San Jose, crates of Del Monte fruit, forgive me Lord, this our prayer.  Neal Cassady, Kerouac's hero, Kesey's bus driver, grew up by the tracks in Denver, cruised Larimer Street, a six year old, slept on the warehouse floor in blankets beside his drunken passed-out snoring father, there, at 3am, he was awakened by the train, and then he heard some angry voices in the street below and he snuggled closer to his father who tossed an arm around the boy.  Ah, the old man loved his son and together he and the lad hopped a moving boxcar, and the young Cassady did it just right, only problem while lifting himself up into the train his hands mushed the fat of raw chicken and he had to sleep with that stink about him for a couple of days.   Of course Cassady, who spent his adult life looking for his father, died on the tracks in Mexico, walking from a wedding party, heading toward Celaya.  High as he tended to be, he made it a couple miles under stormy sky before falling to the tracks, froze to death that rainy night, l973. 

Coltrane rode the train, sat alone in the back carving his reeds and humming the "H" blues.  Some say beauty is form, and as the form migrates, fuses.  Coltrane writes the soultrain, The Trane's Slo Blues, lush life, this life, Blue Train, this algebraic blue, this livid leaden flame, this sorrow, this intoxicated skin, ah blue hills, blue heat, blue smoke--kiss my blue lips blue baby true blue, blue black, blueberry, bluebird--she wondered how she could go on living so blue, blue blood, sangre azul, aristocrat--I am blue-eyed, blue mountain, blue beat, ska, common twill twill twill twee twill, bluegrass, blue collar, blue healer--come into me, enter pigment, the eros of melancholy blue, blue hawk, blue gown, blue pill, mercurial waters, gospel bluing, sudden hellish outcry, it is never enough to sing out the clear sky, the desert, the indefinite distance, the unknown, God.

What's this story about, you might ask.  I could say it's about trains, and that would be right.  I could say it's about the last beauty, and that would be right.  I could say it's about Tully, how he composes music, how he loses himself in his work and how he is saddened when he puts it aside.  This is what the story's about.  It's also about getting off the train, walking three miles across town to her house and knocking on her door, she invites me in, we speak a while, we make love, and then she has to go to work.  "Should we talk about it first?" she says.   I say, "We could try."  And that's what we do, we try talking.  "Do you desire me?” she wants to know.  "Yes," I say, “yes, I desire you.” There's much more to say, but of course, she must go to work, and I head toward the town square, her scent still about my hands, I feel sad and peaceful walking into the market where I sit on the edge of the fountain and watch children throw seed to pigeons.  I ask you, how much beauty can a person bear?  The blue of sunset, the passing of dreams, the fragrance of old mountains, cinder cones, and in the distance, the sound of train leaving the station.  

And there is this separation:  I love you.  Believe me. I look at you sleeping, and think, all things end.  Some believe we meet the beloved again in the next world, in the future.  Father, now gone, what can you say to me from the other side?  Are you hanging out with old friends?  From this side of things, the world is cracked, and in some way even forbidden.

And later, alone, it's raining and the night is thick, hard to cross with any semblance of nuance or finesse. The hill is steep.  I remember you, how you were wild at world's end, you dazzled and refreshed and left me in suspense.  We do not ride the railroad, it rides us.  Exiled, we point to the rooftop and say, "That would be a good place to make love." And then the image is gone, just like that, we are memory, traces among the spheres, then all together gone.  Eternity is more fragile than the skin of a strawberry.   Mouth to mouth, we carry it on our tongues. 

Some say the human form is beautiful.  Adorn it with jewels, cap each tooth with a diamond. Train hard to get in shape, find the perfect fit. Contours. Angles. Holes.  Listen to the train, smell the train, taste the train, lick the train, eat the train, shit the train. Rejoice the symmetry of that.

I sit in a car in the middle of the train, a seat at the window, I have a gift from you, a half pint of Crown Royal that I share with an old man with a toothache.  Pain and pain relief.  I see you out the window.  And my own reflection in the glass.

All the separations, mother from daughter, lover from lover, friend from friend--there are moments of great longing.   But not always.  Sometimes it's all ecstasy to see you go.  You bore me.  Or you work me too hard, you want more than I have to give, you want devotion, you bleed me dry, you annihilate.  Train, take me out of here.  Take me through the mountains. Five minutes down the track the burden is released and I don't remember your face.  Boston, Aberdeen, Winslow, I can hitchhike out from here.  It doesn't matter, I'm free to go, I'll find a trail and walk.  Nothing left behind.  I am a father of myself, I am the going forward, and as I go I'm not alone.  Not at all.  Look down the length of the train.  From every car, from the sleeper, from the dining car, the smoking car, the flatcar, the freight, look at them leap by the dozen from the train.  Look at them fly through the air, angels all and everything we seek.

We each have our train stories.  The more the better.  Stop and listen in this very moment and hear the train.  Listen to the train.  Take it for what it's worth. My first train, New York City, to Yankee Stadium.  Then, many years later, in l973, the same year Cassady died, during a snowstorm, exactly one dollar in my pocket, hopped a freighter in Winslow, Arizona, the car just barely moving, rolled up and landed in the dark flat, protected from the storm in a cold dark cave, womblike, rolling along watching the storm, heading towards Flagstaff and then L.A., happy to have done it, hop a freight, and at my back, all those years leading to a train ride through a snowy night, splendor of frostbite, gazing ahead like a newborn calf, let there be no ravaging of forests, let us not expose the roots of trees. 

Tracks cut the land and lead somewhere--ah destination, picture that.  Follow the tracks.  Boot tracks, deer tracks, trails.  Stop in Winslow Arizona, try that.  Stay for a week.  Rent a motel room near the tracks, listen to the trains all night, yes, and the trucks on I-40.   Watch some flickering T.V. soap operas.  Read Gideon's Bible or a romance novel found under the bed.  For one day, don't leave the room, watch the sun cross the sky through a crack in the plastic drapes.  Keep an eye on the woman who cleans the rooms as she crosses the frosty grey parking lot, curling her lip.  In the morning, after a night of restless sleep and waking with a stiff neck, find a cafe down the road past the fuel storage tanks, eat some eggs and bacon.  Drink thin coffee, feel bloated and greasy in the face.  Tip the waitress.  Walk to stretch the back, walk into the sun, past the school, the trailer houses, the sleeping dogs, the crying babies.  Step over the tracks and into the sagebrush and out of town.  On the flats, feel the wind on the calmest of days. Taste the dust.  Feel the heat through worn shoes. Chew on a sprig of sage, hang out with cows, scuttle north into the drainage of the Little Colorado. Carry water.  Bring a lover, walk the dry mud with a lover, watch the storm approach, shelter in the rocks, light a fire, grow naked, make a bed out of shirt and blouse, touch, kiss, exhilarate, dampen, conceive.  Go for it.  Suck on dry roots.  Celebrate.  Pray.  Glimpse and paint and message.  Go for it.  Go to a bar with a lover in Winslow Arizona--hang against the wall, feel the building crack against the back.  Drink hard stuff, drink cheap liquor, drink Jim Beam, pay for it. Stare in the mirror behind the bar, see a face, a lover's face, how old, how lonely, talk to the man drinking at the bar while the lover goes to the bathroom.   Smoke his cigarettes.  Listen to him talk about guns. About women.  About work, about lost souls, about Indians, about whorehouses and war and Denver and building wooden shelves.  Listen to him talk politics and get in an argument.  Talk Reagan and Central America.   Ask his religion, talk it. Insult him. Do it.  Call him white trash.  Challenge him to a game of chicken, challenge his manhood, his ability to father.  Put forearms together and drop a lit cigarette in the crook, see who flinches first.  Look for the beginning, the mythic center, the moment of creation.  Get in a fight in Winslow Arizona.  Have a cheek punched, a jaw broken, a flattened nose.  Land on an arm, break a collar bone, hurt.  Leave the bar with a bleeding face and a boot track on the ribs, find the alley and stumble along with an arm in a sling.  Make your way to the tracks, wondering what happened to the lover.  Notice lingering figures following the tracks.  Sit through the night at the rail yard with a broken collar bone and a black eye.  Sit for one entire day in the rail yard. Look toward Albuquerque, toward LA.  Trains pass, stop, switch.  The wind comes from the west, the workers hold their hats to their heads. Watch the sun cross the sky and pass through dim-blue clouds.  Imagine landscapes.  Imagine the Mogollon Rim, imagine Tuba City, imagine the Hopi buttes.  See the San Francisco Peaks, imagine how they came to be called sacred.  Imagine terrible sacrifice. Kit Carson torching the magical peach orchards on the floor of Canyon de Chelly. Look for a father in those charred stumps.

Walk the tracks in a dust storm in Winslow Arizona and go there and feel separated from the world, the flux of life, feel cut off, severed, hammered.  Meet the separated.  Find body parts on the tracks.  Find arms, find the arms of a man who laid under a train, on the tracks find fingers, hands, legs, heads.  Find a man's head.  Severed.  Separated.  Bladed.  Guillotined.  Separate from the world.  Do it now.  Fall into machine, like Henry Martino, 24, while trying to jump a moving boxcar, both hands on the floor of the open boxcar, running along with the train, pushing up exactly like the book says, but, as is bound to happen, lose concentration, lose balance, kick a foot to balance, and when a foot catches in the wheel know that the tragedy is near an end, know the next moment will be the most violent, and after that there will be no pain.  Find fingers.  Find bone.  Lots of empty shoes on the tracks between Winslow and Holbrook.  Remain in Winslow for a full week.  Suck the raw beauty from that.  Speak the last beauty.  Take the train to wherever the train goes.  Pay for it with cash.  Pay for it with a swollen rib or a lover's migrant song.

Tully, what do you see on the bottom of the train as it passes?  Is it possible to truly understand the underside of things?  When you play the guitar, do you see the face of a man, do you see your father?  A mustache?  Do you hear his voice, is it deep, is it scarred?  Does he saunter and work with his hands?  Does he build cellos and mandolins?  Is it him, at the end of things, this last beauty?  Is his skin black, is it tinted amber, do they call him by his first name?   Is he made of bone or is he a space to enter?  Is he an invented thing?  Tully, tell me, how naked are we beneath our clothes?

Fireweed grows through the ties.  The womb so much like a river, from the river to the tracks, the breeze is cold.  A cool blue moon, this train rolls slowly, at first creeping, then building up speed.  Anatomy is destiny, and the sign at track's end says, “Enter Here.”  And trained as we are, we do as it says, we enter, we stumble, we sleep.  In this moment, everything and all surrounds us, the beauty of it all.  Dream down what meaning may come; the sky if full of sound.  It is in the wind, fellow, the end of the day is forever upon us, now speak.