Train out of Altoona

You are taking the train. You are taking the train from where you began
and you plan to ride till the end.

In the railroad repair yard, red trolley car barns stenciled with the names
of the old gods, the SAMUEL RAY SHOPS

and the PRR, serried windows chalked white or gapped like bad teeth.
The station was grand before it burned,

its rose window and white limestone salvaged and hauled off at night
to some richer city,

and where you wait now is all prefab walls, one room with one story
set in a tangle of tracks no longer sorted

by trains pulling through. In the yard, locomotives rust to rails that go
nowhere, and a candelabra of brick smokestacks

restates the proof of rectangles able to curve into a cylindrical figure
and of the creatures that molted these husks,

but where are they now, and is this all that is left of their history?

The whistle blows and the train slips past boarded-up storefronts,
neon signs half-winking on,

the Boyer Candy factory gone dark, the silk mills gone dark; no work,
no workers, no work.

Lakemont Park bounded by chain link, its vast pleasure pool drained
and the lake silting in, its Ferris wheel of bones.

Main Street’s crumbling brownstones giving way to peeling-paint
row houses sharing walls and a backyard

piled with oil drums, car parts, and metal bed frames. Where are they,
the people who burned the oil,

drove the cars, made babies in those beds, where are they?

Beyond the last house, a low circle of mountains, the world in a blue bowl
you once felt safe in,

cinder swales sloped down from fields frozen in stubble; a thresher’s mute
claws, rust-streaked silos

stenciled with hex signs and ads for Mail Pouch Tobacco and Jesus Who Saves;
Jesus who did not save.

You are on the train from where you began in the years when all ways
led out, and you lean back, soothed

by the hum of time and momentum, but beneath you the cross-ties
have been working loose like teeth

from the moment they first were pinned, and so the engine must slow,
creaking and groaning

and must slow again until you are almost not moving at all, and sometimes
the train stops and then

—you are not imagining this—it begins to move backward.