Train

I dreamed train.

Every time my tongue hit the back of my teeth it was small wheels rolling and jangling against the railroad tracks. Bread and butter slid along my mouth like grease along the intimate inner workings of that mysterious machine. When I exhaled white puffs into the air I was making the clouds that train made out of coal. Every grimeless cell in me yearned toward train.

It was hard for me to fall asleep in those days, and my thoughts always would drift to train, the lulling motion of it, the constant motion of it, the idea of getting somewhere. Train meant Chicago, train meant New York, but train also meant crossing countryside. Train solved paradoxes: you could travel without moving. You could be sitting, or sleeping, or writing a letter, and all the time the motion would be going on around you, and you could not even feel it, but you would wake up one day in Ohio, the next day in Indiana, the next day in Illinois. You could do two things at once without even trying. When you were in train travel was like breath, equally unstoppable.

I went and had my baked potato and didn't say anything at all and went to bed and thought my veins into railroad tracks, the capsules of my blood into a billion red boxcars. My heart was the grandest and centrallest of train stations. The skin of the potato was ground up into hunks of coal that little men, sweating, saving up, shoveled into the fire.