Intercourse

Jane Munro
From:   Point No Point

A long freight train drawn
across the prairie like a tape marked
Pull Here—green cattle cars, brown flat cars,
silver tankers: a sentence moving its burden elsewhere.
Word after word used over and over. Transports
tying a country together.
The slow strip of a whistle uncovers
longing the way spreading a lather of suds down
my arms in the shower and watching a spray undress me
to the skin again arouses an echo of earlier days
when buttons
were for undoing. The way I longed to
speak French after a trip to Perc�. Riding a little train
across the Gasp�, seeing into the backyards of villages.
A woman hanging out her wash waving
to me, and a man
in a pickup stopping behind a dropped
crossing gate, getting out of his cab and nodding at cars
rolling by, their wheels squealing.
I began to build another
vocabulary,
laying crossties week after week, imagining
a new country opening up, but I never laid enough
rail to ride. Now the wish for another language
relinquished, or so I thought,
but the freight
rumbling east pulls my eyes along its line
the way, from time to time, I'm astonished by my life—
its many branch lines—its
impossibility.

Poem 1 | Poem 2 | Poem 3 | Poem 4 | Poem 5 | Poem 6

Jane Munro's works copyright © to the author.