Long Island Railroad

The sun hangs over Long Island Sound
like a dirty copper kettle—
we are held between the earth
and sky
seascape and treescape
zoom us by
lurch us toward the future in a silvery tube.

The lady across the aisle is knitting
up a blur, her gray eyes focus
and unfocus on the object coming out
of her steepled fingers—
a cream coloured serpent
an infinity scarf
her body pushed into a beige wool coat
her hair pinned under a beige beret
her feet pushed into walking boots
click click her fingers keep time—
“Knitting,” she suggests, “is one
thing to do when people
are watching and there’s
nothing to do...”

The trainwheels make cartwheels
inside our brains, our eardrums
refine their metallic sound-track
axles shift to cymbals to shut
out the world Wool-and-Water
comes to mind
at the seventeenth mile
although you are not really Alice,
even Alice wouldn’t fit in here
clanks and booms
whizzing pavements
the dizzy hush of towns

the ground is a pasty whirr
of spiralling gibberish and leaves
orchestrated between hotdog
and styrofoam bites
skittle skattle
you can hear the invisible
cantatas of castaway cookies
with poison raising eyes—
the future is discardable
as muffin wrappers or
the flash of a yellow sneaker
its tongue draped over
a fencepost’s splintery tooth.

Garbage comprises
a sufficient sculpture
if we close our eyes
a billboard dressed up in champagne
as piquant as a whiff of poverty.

We watch the dirty and the dirtier towns
come and go with the winter nibs of trees
the louder grafitti
as it shrieks

let me show you
the magic of decay.
Mister Jabberwock appears, hunger
slicking back his hair, the corners
of his mouth— he opens his jacket
revealing a swarm of silver.
“Here’s the way to catch a lady—
buy her a diamond Omega
a three-clawed dragon
or a rhinestone skull!”

The blue of his fingernails disturbs you
his nostrils’ rusty pipes that match
two used cokestraws stirring
in his vest pocket—

“—hurry please, I ain’t
got all day!”

The veiny line that runs
from the crack of his palm
to the indigo ball
in his elbow crook
looks starved and when
the knitting lady refuses
you can smell his disgust
all the way to the next car.

As we are hooked into Brooklyn Heights
its sooty gargoyles, mauves and grease
biting into the night—
our faces are lit by a sinister candle
our eyes catch like stars in the tarpaper skydeath and all its tasty contours
darkness softens these dead tenements
warms their Victorian marrow
some of them extinct
blink back at us from horror
house veneers, all colours beaten
from their stained-glass eyes
where urban gypsy shadows
hunch over bundles
their bodies trained stalagmites.

Bang!

We are moving in time to Marlboro
red and white flashes life tilts
purrs the ad like a cigarette
parked between patented
perfect teeth

The knitting lady smiles.

Penn Station closes in like a déjà-vû
its tunnel threads us
we are pulled
down the rabbit hole
whose full time inhabitants
asleep beneath their idols
the commercials they could be
if only they could swallow
the yellowbrick American dream.

The knitting lady slips out of her beige
underneath she shimmers
a million vermilion sequins
and under her walking boots
she reveals a pair of princess feet
so dainty the conductor takes
another breath.

“Last stop!”

The knitting lady paints her lips
and takes off her beret to expose
a vermilion coiffure:

“Call me Gina.”

Mister Jabberwock returns
to proffer a three-clawed ruby dragon
and they disappear together
into the diesel-and-pretzel gloom.

The conductor pulls out
a large pocket watch
and informs you that this train
has long since ground to a halt.

Mythographies©1990 SASkarstedt

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