Fresno Flyer

image by buttkus.

Fresno Flyer

“I know my mother named me after a railroad man,

but it’s too late to change it now.”--Hoagy Carmichael.

Riding the rails was

a national mode of real

transportation once.

When I was nine, we lived in Georgetown,

close to the Rainier brewery, & a huge train yard.

I used to walk to school, cutting across the yard

to save several blocks of travel. One sunny morning

as I stepped across a complicated maze of tracks, a

switchman down the line swung his great lever, activating

the tracks beneath me to switch. This happened quickly & it caught

my right foot between the shifting rails, making a horrendous clunk.

My small foot was uninjured, but my shoe was hopelessly stuck. I

put my Roy Rogers metal lunchbox down on the cross-ties, & tugged

& tugged to no avail. 

Then I saw & heard a clanking line of boxcars backing

          toward me. Panicked, I managed to pull my foot out, 

                    abandoning my shoe. The grunting train backed past me,

                              as I stood a few tracks away. The engineer in the

                    locomotive saw me, & made an angry gesture, waving his    

           arm, pointing out of the yard. His actual words were lost beneath

    the sound of great metal bogie wheels squeaking on shiny steel tracks,

& the chug-chug-chug of the diesel engine. I retrieved what was left of my

                     shoe, & sort of wore it at school that day. I got a whipping

                     when I got home--they had been a new pair of shoes, but

                     the leather belt welts didn’t keep me out of vast fascinating

                     train yard.

When I was a kid

I used to think that working

for the Railroad would be a great job        but by the time I was a teenager

                           I decided I would be a movie star/writer/teacher; & I was

                           in a limited sort of way. Still I studied trains, loved them

                           & photographed them.

When you look at it,

train terminology becomes a poem in itself--

Bogies,

Baker valve gears,

Backhead,

Blastpipe,

Buchlie drive,

Firebox, Couplers, Lempor injectors,

Crossheads, Quill drive, Dead Man’s switch,

Haman speed indicator, jackshaft, Kuhn slides,

Johnson Bar & Hancock air whistles.

Boxcar blues still thrump

like a slide guitar midst my

midnight insomnia.

Glenn Buttkus

Posted over at dVerse Poets Pub Poetics

Would you like to hear me read this Train Poem?