The train you are riding will only go forward

Two poems by Kai Carlson-Wee

Author

Publish Date

Dec. 7, 2016

Where the Feeling Deserts Us

I wake somewhere on the outskirts of Portland.
The crickets are singing. The train is refusing
to breathe. Off in the distance a truck gears down
on a service road bordered in trees. The river
beside me, babbling kind. Headache. Earache.
All I can see of the field dissolves in a stale white blanket
of moon. Nothing moves. Even the cold machinery
seems to be riding itself in a dream.
Sliding away from the steel retainer walls.
Boxcars stalled on the next four strings. The train
is my shepherd. I finger a dead leaf. Star-lights dance
in the field beyond my cage. We are never returning
to the field itself, only the mystery hidden inside.
Night after night in the speed of your leaving.
Soft of your veined hands tracing my thigh.
The flavor of dust where the feeling deserts us.
Maybe the blonde heads of needlegrass swaying.
Bodies of cows in the next field over. I pull up the blanket
to cover my bare arms. Cool air filled
with the pressures of falling dew. This is the best
I can give for a reason — the metal accepts you,
whoever you are. The train you are riding will only
go forward. The straight line is perfectly clear.

Holes in the Mountain

Even the dead rats in the alleys of Oxford,
head-crushed and tossed in a trashbag,
left to fester behind the fence, are waiting
for crows to divide them, to carry their bodies
away. And if not crows, or the street pigeons
picking a leg-bone, then the broom
of a street-sweeper keeping a rhythm
to one of the tunes in his head. Or the wind
as it funnels the dust in a mini-tornado
above him. Because it isn’t enough
to say god is the speed of the wheel
that turns the sky, or that god is the distance
between two trains, hurtling at the same speed
toward you. It doesn’t matter what stories we use
to explain these impossible themes —
they will always turn fake or explode
in our faces. On Mount St. Helens
the fires went into the roots of the oldest pines,
smoldered and stayed in the coals for a month
before burning the farms on the opposite side
of the mountain. They found this out later,
tracking a mouse through a network
of intricate caves. We used to have ways
of explaining our failures. Now all we do
is erase them by spreading the veils of blame
so thin. The scars on our hands are only around
to remind us: don’t grow old in yourself,
don’t get lost in this scrimmage. Because even
death, in its marble skies and free-wheeling borders
is an art of remembering everything over.
And although the soul is a joke we tell
to the part of ourselves we can touch,
it’s only because the soul is a fire, and laughs
at our sorrow, and has already survived us.

Kai Carlson-Wee’s first poetry collection, RAIL, is forthcoming from BOA Editions. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he lives in San Francisco and is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.