Epistle: Leaving

By Kerrin McCadden
Dear train wreck, dear terrible engines, dear spilled freight,
    dear unbelievable mess, all these years later I think
    to write back. I was not who I am now. A sail is a boat,
    a bark is a boat, a mast is a boat and the train was you an me.
    Dear dark, dear paper, dear files I can't toss, dear calendar
    and visitation schedule, dear hello and goodbye.
If a life is one thing and then another; if no grasses grow
    through the tracks; if the train wreck is a red herring;
    if goodbye then sincerely. Dear disappeared bodies
    and transitions, dear edge of a good paragraph.
    Before the wreck, we misunderstood revision.
I revise things now. I teach pertinence. A girl in class told
    us about some boys who found bodies on the tracks
    then went back and they were gone, the bodies.
    It was true that this story was a lie, like all things
done to be seen. I still think about this story, what it would
    be like to be a boy finding bodies out in the woods,
    however they were left—and think of all the ways they
    could be left. There I was, teaching the building
    of a good paragraph, dutiful investigator
of sentences, thinking dear boys, dear stillness in the woods,
    until, again, there is the boy I knew as a man
    whose father left him at a gas station, and unlike the lie
    of the girl's story, this one is true—he left him there for good.
Sometimes this boy, nine and pale, is sitting next to me, sitting there
    watching trains go past the gas station in Wyoming,
    thinking there is a train going one way, and a train
    going the other way, each at different and variable speeds:
    how many miles before something happens
    that feels like answers when we write them down—
like solid paragraphs full of transitional phrases
    and compound, complex sentences, the waiting space
    between things that ends either in pleasure or pain. He
    keeps showing up, dear boy, man now, and beautiful
like the northern forest, hardwoods iced over.

Copyright Credit: Kerrin McCadden, "Epistle: Leaving" from American Wake. Copyright © 2021 by Kerrin McCadden. Reprinted by permission of Black Sparrow / David R Godine, Publisher, Inc., www.godine.com.
Source: American Wake (Black Sparrow Press (Godine))