Night Tracks

I rode a Pullman back from boarding school.
We traveled the night tracks of Virginia and Tennessee.
Every hope and prayer I knew sped by, now and then caught
in the blinks of small town lights at crossroads.

Behind me, my first date with a blonde named Weezie Firth,
The track in winter where I clattered out the 440,
Hawthorn and Poe, Coleridge and Yeats,
Buns Lathem's classes where I had a first date with my own art.

In front of me, the old station under the grey bridge in Knoxville,
The ride home in my father's long blue car,
The old house, the old taunts, the old ways of seeing,
The endless games of dodging guilt bombs tossed between parents.

I rode a Pullman back from boarding school.
We traveled the night tracks of Virginia and Tennessee.
Every hope and prayer I knew sped by, now and then caught
in the blinks of small town lights at crossroads.