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Discontinued line

Along the trail you can see a few yards of track, in places

clear enough for the wind to excavate, a little span

of built and parallel in the biggest forest, like a dreamer

once planted two rows of old nickels for a hedgerow.

The story doesn't vary much: the only game in town

(the mill, the factory, the grand hotel) slowed,

then stopped, and the rail killed the branch,

then the division, then the line. The through towns pried up

paved over when hope for that age was lost. Some kept

the depot as a novelty. You'll see a fallow overpass,

a road too wide for cars, the dead catenary. Railroad

Ave. is renamed for a dead mayor. But the miles

outside anyone's claim were left. And you cannot escape

feeling two points unjoined. But the track, even buried,

who remembers the weight of the engine on her back,

cannot be comforted as you are by the vast growing back.

You have only studied the war that widowed her.