What We Did with the Train Stations

These are the train stations

--Or at least, these used to be

The train stations

We turned them into gardens

And restaurants

And theaters

We turned them into churches

And temples

And indoor swimming pools

We turned them into soup kitchens

And shelters

And warehouses

Some of them we left alone

And people moved into them

Good people and bad people

People with families

People who didn’t have anywhere else to go

People who liked trains

Or who used to like trains

Back when there were some

We let vines and bushes

Overtake some of the stations

And pretty soon

They became their own forests

Filled with animals

And darkness

Sounds and cries

If trains have ghosts

Then those stations

Were as haunted as anything

Stragglers walking by them at night

Swore they could hear the roar of the engine

And the screech of the brakes

On the tracks

One station still has people going in and out of it everyday

They walk in, sit, look down at their hands

Stare up at an unmoving clock

Wait a few hours

And then head home

Feeling tired

Feeling like they used to feel

Back when they had somewhere to be

There’s a station in Washington

That’s guarded by an old woman

With a shotgun

Who fires off a round

At anybody that goes near the place

There’s a station in Ohio

Where people play music night and day

Drink moonshine and hard cider

And talk about the world that fell away

When things were connected

By steel rods

And coal

And steam

We never tore a station down

Not a one

Because we told ourselves

That they were somehow sacred

That they represented something

And that whatever that was

Needed to be honored

And enshrined

Some of us would sit with our fathers

On the old wooden benches

Next to the empty newspaper stands

And close our eyes

And will the trains to move again

We’d imagine the wheels rolling

And the conductor checking his watch

We imagined trains the way they were

Years before they stopped working

Past the last point of progress

Back to when they were still a thing of magic

And romance

‘And they could take you anywhere,’ our fathers said to us

Anywhere

A place we’d like to go

If we could find a way to get there

If we could look at a ghost

And make it

Come alive