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      November 23, 2013Rachel Guido deVriesGhost Train

      Smoke rises industrial in puffs that look innocent
      as early morning fog over the banks of the Hudson,
      its filth disguised as beauty beneath shimmery sunlight.
      For long moments on the train I neglect death
      and poison and the lies that let them live,
      more potent than love, more lethal than rage.
      Oh yet so lovely, I croon, the rippling river
      in winter light, snow dusting the palisades
      and river banks where still graceful trees bow
      as though in devotion, or prayer, to earth,
      to river, to air.

      *
      A girl in a canoe rounds the curve
      of river and life hunches in its belly,
      freezing and afraid. To run
      with the river once lovely. To die
      in fear of fist and madness, in blurry
      eyes once filmed with lust and love
      like a curse curled into speech,
      the sneering and snarled mouths
      of some men’s anger. She stands upright
      in the rocking canoe, flings her arms high,
      purpled with bruises and cold, skinny
      and easy to snap as a sapling’s twigs,
      but free, even to drown unknown
      in this winding river, full of winter’s
      cold, and the chemicals of his despair.

      *
      Like a carnival barker, a trainman
      sings of pot pie for lunch in the diner,
      of the man who plucked fifty chickens
      in the deep of night, of the feathers
      still floating down the aisles of the train,
      wispy as dandelion fluff to wish on,
      looking innocent as that industrial smoke
      drifting all around us, remnants
      of what we’ve killed, or are killing.

      from #20 - Winter 2003