Anthony DeGregorio
IT TAKES A TRAIN TO CRY (BOB DYLAN): LAMENT FOR AN AMERICAN DREAM
The thick train window is a wet screen for the flickering silent movie sprawling beyond the unchanging world inside the rattling railcar. The view seen by countless travelers over numerous generations is a scene regularly altered beyond recognition. The blue and green houses further north are so many worn toys and billboard caricatures of serenity, pressed irregularly into dusk’s smoky, blueberry landscape. America was merely a newspaper word to me, its stretching physical freedom a black and white melodrama staged neatly between commercials in seven-minute scenes, and just as happily portrayed in ever-optimistic and faded orange grammar school textbooks. At times, when the early autumn darkness swallows the coach, I long to get off the train and meet someone in the tall, shivering amber grass who will invite me home. At first she is nothing more than adventure, a mental inferior, a shape in the mind’s amorphous background. But soon I realize she has traveled and arrived while I continue to ride motionless between stations, achieving no destination save that of repetition.
The sudden thick inhalation of trapped, heated air is an anesthetic delivered, a merciful injection, lulling me into sleep's descent and a dream sense of distance, of views so far away that I can make out nothing at first beyond the parallel border of interstate highway.
Black and tired carcasses of sinewy truck tires, blown out and shredded, snake along the roadside, pushed onto the slightly angled dirt-speckled shoulders by ever larger passing vehicles. The broad, solid white line often separating life from death, movement from opposite direction movement, in worn shades of treaded grey. Erratic black scars highlight futility and success, screeching skids burned curving into the road’s skin. These time prints of speed, and space crudely measured, blemish the outstretched path with panic, in primitive machine-assisted drawings of 20th century madness in rubber on asphalt, disappearing as quickly as they have appeared, dead-ending like tracks from birds that simply stop in the snow and take flight into the impenetrable skyway. Long thin lines of tar stitch the quilt of highway; dark threads of repair, mapping the unnamed local roads leading softly away into a vanishing countryside.
Clouds of concrete dust spray weightless into ascent, rise above the temporary barriers of the guard rails of new construction and repavement. The solid is turned back into the ash of change, its thin breath coating the calloused and worn hands of Highway Department creation. The speed-induced breeze films the air with a fertilizer, seeds the adolescent morning’s scent with distance. A canvas of purple wildflowers blankets a shapeless eastern expanse angled now at forty-five degrees to the sun. Workers raise green billboards that summon travelers to reverse their direction and step into the past. Registered historic sites, via memorabilia’s cash register, flash digital times to the tenths of seconds, propositioning us to browse history’s showroom Shoppe while there’s still time! Antiques sacrifice themselves for our purchasing pleasure at old fashion prices if we exit NOW.
Burnt-out cool grey skeletons of barns and sheds sink into the land-anchored sky’s backdrop. Haphazard patches of flowers and sizzling cornfields carpet the western border. Junkyards of iron and refrigerators preserve nothing any longer save stillness and mold, but I am certain I see my uncle's smashed, huge 1961 Buick that protected the whole family in a head-on collision from which we in our car all walked away, for the most part physically unharmed. A child’s mystery and fright from thirty years ago felt again, never fully put to rest. The tail fins still spread in recognition, in a solemn sacrifice recalled, the priest’s outstretched arms. (“He died for your …”)
Melting tire castles doilied in Queen Anne’s Lace fortress trailer parks armed with satellite dishes and golden rod. Overgrown abandoned brick railroad stations missing half circle red shingles of rooftops reflect an elderly countenance of loss and wear. Bloated Dutch barns refuse to exhale and will not cave in completely to emptiness, to monotony. Their dark spaces instead store only memory’s transparent webs, punctured long ago with light that easily found the structure’s cracks. Jaded weather vanes sigh in a wind-nudged moan, barely east or west, disinterested in any direction. Boats tilt, suspended as in a faded photograph, long dry-docked in gravel yards that no longer crunch in expectation or promise under any pre-radial tire weight of hope or potential.
Over thirty years ago, I sat in a backyard that was humbled by the giant erector set towers of electricity’s shrine. The silver monolith hummed its mission’s eerie hymn and offered progress’ salvation to a growing population’s lust for excess. My uncle stood, white apron well above his belt, an overly large chef’s hat tilted like Pisa’s Tower, smiling broadly, arms raised, holding a giant fork in one hand. He welcomed the entire family to his greeting-line table of kegs of root beer, German potato salad, sausages, hotdogs and hamburgers, and a baked variety of Italian casseroles. And every ten minutes or so the crackle of grey pebbles signaled the excitement of arrival or the hushed muffle of dusky departures. For years, I could not hear that sound of gravel under rubber and not tingle with a vague sense of expectation. But before these now speed-blurred barns and homes, fading into a background of forgotten state routes and aging shacks overgrown with a grass of disillusionment, the gravel remains undisturbed, silent and resigned.
A jolt to the body, the train sharply pulls the loosely shackled cars; a dream cruelly twitches with the cerebral rhythm of awakening, cold measured consciousness. And the vast prison complex itself vibrates alongside the interstate, within its own tracts. The business of retention is practiced parallel to the state’s other sell of travel, of escape and packaged disappearance and romance along the uniformly-colored odd and even numbered interstates and railway routes. Desire for the glistening friction of asphalt and steel, and the staleness of groaning, imposed inertia rise in a sour, yellow-tinted mist behind the tensed ache of tight fences and angry arrows of barbed wire. The strict squares of flood lights soak orange jumpsuit skins faded and heavy with perspiration and bodily fluids. Behind these walls, pathways metamorphosed into concrete corridors, into clusters of cages that calculated distance in plots of six feet by ten feet.
Opening my eyes, I inhale my own breath. It is a breath of memory, the breath a man inhales from a woman at four in the morning long after hours of rushed conversation have stopped, long before either wants to end the night. It is the breath of an approaching summer’s dawn when the tepid cool of darkness begins to give way to the desperate August heat. It is the breath of milk long since thinned by the acid of years, by the years of hours of slightly open-mouthed stares into the same narrow, unyielding cement ceiling.
The thin film of perspiration on her forehead is exhaustion from sleeplessness and anxious idleness, and from the coming day’s heat. The train slows curiously outside a small town in the northernmost part of the state, just shy of the border, and moisture brushes the window; dawn forges the blue darkness back into the grey bars of resignation and electronic solitude once again.
The thick train window is a wet screen for the flickering silent movie sprawling beyond the unchanging world inside the rattling railcar. The view seen by countless travelers over numerous generations is a scene regularly altered beyond recognition. The blue and green houses further north are so many worn toys and billboard caricatures of serenity, pressed irregularly into dusk’s smoky, blueberry landscape. America was merely a newspaper word to me, its stretching physical freedom a black and white melodrama staged neatly between commercials in seven-minute scenes, and just as happily portrayed in ever-optimistic and faded orange grammar school textbooks. At times, when the early autumn darkness swallows the coach, I long to get off the train and meet someone in the tall, shivering amber grass who will invite me home. At first she is nothing more than adventure, a mental inferior, a shape in the mind’s amorphous background. But soon I realize she has traveled and arrived while I continue to ride motionless between stations, achieving no destination save that of repetition.
The sudden thick inhalation of trapped, heated air is an anesthetic delivered, a merciful injection, lulling me into sleep's descent and a dream sense of distance, of views so far away that I can make out nothing at first beyond the parallel border of interstate highway.
Black and tired carcasses of sinewy truck tires, blown out and shredded, snake along the roadside, pushed onto the slightly angled dirt-speckled shoulders by ever larger passing vehicles. The broad, solid white line often separating life from death, movement from opposite direction movement, in worn shades of treaded grey. Erratic black scars highlight futility and success, screeching skids burned curving into the road’s skin. These time prints of speed, and space crudely measured, blemish the outstretched path with panic, in primitive machine-assisted drawings of 20th century madness in rubber on asphalt, disappearing as quickly as they have appeared, dead-ending like tracks from birds that simply stop in the snow and take flight into the impenetrable skyway. Long thin lines of tar stitch the quilt of highway; dark threads of repair, mapping the unnamed local roads leading softly away into a vanishing countryside.
Clouds of concrete dust spray weightless into ascent, rise above the temporary barriers of the guard rails of new construction and repavement. The solid is turned back into the ash of change, its thin breath coating the calloused and worn hands of Highway Department creation. The speed-induced breeze films the air with a fertilizer, seeds the adolescent morning’s scent with distance. A canvas of purple wildflowers blankets a shapeless eastern expanse angled now at forty-five degrees to the sun. Workers raise green billboards that summon travelers to reverse their direction and step into the past. Registered historic sites, via memorabilia’s cash register, flash digital times to the tenths of seconds, propositioning us to browse history’s showroom Shoppe while there’s still time! Antiques sacrifice themselves for our purchasing pleasure at old fashion prices if we exit NOW.
Burnt-out cool grey skeletons of barns and sheds sink into the land-anchored sky’s backdrop. Haphazard patches of flowers and sizzling cornfields carpet the western border. Junkyards of iron and refrigerators preserve nothing any longer save stillness and mold, but I am certain I see my uncle's smashed, huge 1961 Buick that protected the whole family in a head-on collision from which we in our car all walked away, for the most part physically unharmed. A child’s mystery and fright from thirty years ago felt again, never fully put to rest. The tail fins still spread in recognition, in a solemn sacrifice recalled, the priest’s outstretched arms. (“He died for your …”)
Melting tire castles doilied in Queen Anne’s Lace fortress trailer parks armed with satellite dishes and golden rod. Overgrown abandoned brick railroad stations missing half circle red shingles of rooftops reflect an elderly countenance of loss and wear. Bloated Dutch barns refuse to exhale and will not cave in completely to emptiness, to monotony. Their dark spaces instead store only memory’s transparent webs, punctured long ago with light that easily found the structure’s cracks. Jaded weather vanes sigh in a wind-nudged moan, barely east or west, disinterested in any direction. Boats tilt, suspended as in a faded photograph, long dry-docked in gravel yards that no longer crunch in expectation or promise under any pre-radial tire weight of hope or potential.
Over thirty years ago, I sat in a backyard that was humbled by the giant erector set towers of electricity’s shrine. The silver monolith hummed its mission’s eerie hymn and offered progress’ salvation to a growing population’s lust for excess. My uncle stood, white apron well above his belt, an overly large chef’s hat tilted like Pisa’s Tower, smiling broadly, arms raised, holding a giant fork in one hand. He welcomed the entire family to his greeting-line table of kegs of root beer, German potato salad, sausages, hotdogs and hamburgers, and a baked variety of Italian casseroles. And every ten minutes or so the crackle of grey pebbles signaled the excitement of arrival or the hushed muffle of dusky departures. For years, I could not hear that sound of gravel under rubber and not tingle with a vague sense of expectation. But before these now speed-blurred barns and homes, fading into a background of forgotten state routes and aging shacks overgrown with a grass of disillusionment, the gravel remains undisturbed, silent and resigned.
A jolt to the body, the train sharply pulls the loosely shackled cars; a dream cruelly twitches with the cerebral rhythm of awakening, cold measured consciousness. And the vast prison complex itself vibrates alongside the interstate, within its own tracts. The business of retention is practiced parallel to the state’s other sell of travel, of escape and packaged disappearance and romance along the uniformly-colored odd and even numbered interstates and railway routes. Desire for the glistening friction of asphalt and steel, and the staleness of groaning, imposed inertia rise in a sour, yellow-tinted mist behind the tensed ache of tight fences and angry arrows of barbed wire. The strict squares of flood lights soak orange jumpsuit skins faded and heavy with perspiration and bodily fluids. Behind these walls, pathways metamorphosed into concrete corridors, into clusters of cages that calculated distance in plots of six feet by ten feet.
Opening my eyes, I inhale my own breath. It is a breath of memory, the breath a man inhales from a woman at four in the morning long after hours of rushed conversation have stopped, long before either wants to end the night. It is the breath of an approaching summer’s dawn when the tepid cool of darkness begins to give way to the desperate August heat. It is the breath of milk long since thinned by the acid of years, by the years of hours of slightly open-mouthed stares into the same narrow, unyielding cement ceiling.
The thin film of perspiration on her forehead is exhaustion from sleeplessness and anxious idleness, and from the coming day’s heat. The train slows curiously outside a small town in the northernmost part of the state, just shy of the border, and moisture brushes the window; dawn forges the blue darkness back into the grey bars of resignation and electronic solitude once again.
~
