Radiator Comics

Description

A poem about the trains that once ran behind the homes in East Chicago, the illustrations in this minicomic tell the story of the changing relationship between a young girl and her father, whose lives run parallel to the trains.

Trains
They came in the beginning
and in the end.
The groundwork was laid
in a time before you, or I,
just behind the fence, there.
There was no barbed wire,
no caution sign,
we walked right up to them.
A rider pulled on the reins,
slowing them to a crawl,
past the tender bodies of children.
We never outgrew the wonder,
touching with fingers, wary,
then settling our flat palms on their heaving bellies.
They halted with a hiss, pliant,
sinking their heft into the rails.
Even then there was the danger
of a beast resting,
suddenly thrusting awake.
Lopping off a finger,
slicing through bone.
We made pennies lucky on the rails,
the copper bending like paper,
our mothers shouting a warning
from a kitchen window.
When they came charging,
screaming a warning,
there was no stopping—
for hound or child or car.
Their charge shook the very earth,
shook beds like a quarter-pony ride,
the pressure of their keening
peaked past our heavy heads,
their wake a silence so pristine—
for sleep, for dreams.
They never changed as we did—
not like records to cassettes,
or radio to TV,
dresses to pants,
or Eisenhower to Clinton.
They were Arthurian legend.
Even now you can still pull
a rutted spike from the earth—
a fang, a tooth,
proof that they existed.
I don’t know which one
was the last one.
There was no ticker-tape parade,
no kerchiefs waved—
it just went by
unceremoniously,
unknown.
Until we heard that too-long silence,
that dead-quiet,
and that’s when we knew—
the dragons had flown.