0041 Goods Train In The Night

Film meets the poetic image, and in some things never fails – as when out there alone in the prairie - the steppes, the tundra, snowfields, desert - past midnight, the heavens a carpet of stars, maybe a flash over the horizon of Northern Lights, or the centered assurance of the Southern Cross, silence broken only by a howl, was that a wolf, just one observer as a camera, a poet, whom we never see.. and then a distant sound and one plaintive assertive impersonal wail and almost too soon, the fast rhythmic rattle of a goods train on the railway line over there but near enough to shake the scene, and seemingly endless; minutes pass? then as suddenly it’s past, it’s gone… and the silence following is deeper, huge, saying something huge by the absence of anything said…or back in the city, the child rewarded for trust by trust, allowed to wander the railway goods yard next to the gasworks down the sulphured end of town, miniatured rail tracks leading to the glowing maw of the furnaces; but all afternoon-sleepy between trains except for over there, the ceaseless smack and clang and clink of chain and barely audible sigh of wagon wheels and buffers as invisible engine and railwaymen shunt and couple, shunt, uncouple, couple, empty wagons for return to far-off places named upon their sides… was this how I learned to make poetry, shunting, uncoupling, coupling empty words into lines of trucks that have direction, to return to heart's-truth and poetry and timely, late at night, out there in the waiting solitude to disturb that great silence under a canopy of stars, singing their rhythm in the dreaming night with the assurance of human company, leaving behind them a deeper silence in the listening heart