The Train Blues
written by: Lori Marchesin
The train is speed, music and space. You get on; it leaves and starts tuning its wheels on the tracks. Your eyes absorb space; when most of it overflows and melts, you stop it pressing your palms on the eyelids, impress images, flashes of trees, sky and smoky earth, and open your eyes again to drink more space till you feel drunk and your head spins. Speed makes space smaller, and enables you to capture a ribbon twisted in spirals of leaves and blue. Your hands can’t hold space, but your eyes can, they dilate, become space themselves, and then the music intensifies with notes that hop and pop between the train’s whistling and the heart’s ticking. The rhythm varies: it drags in the wind, slows and grows gloomy while tunnelling through houses. It’s the music of a journey to the unknown — the excitement of a Dixieland with space and speed as instruments and voices, and it’s the train’s blues, deep and low, broken by a high cry of smoke and steel when space is encapsulated into a station.
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