de Chirico's trains

I didn't feel til I saw it, almost beside a yard in the north end: de Chirico's train, i.e. idling on its tracks, whose thin, ineradicable smoke I could've easily etched in my head & the spare ugsome yard (better than he),

what with tree webs slung on their sides, cicadas' sick meat still dangling inside, and all of it recalled by the coil of a ghostly train But as a child does so a train wails where'er it goes, too, over its own gravelly rumpus grounds:

its sounds like arms flailing down to something hid between sickness & the stink caused by its oily smoke

As if the pickets of my yard had been bitten, too

Trains--I find-- will give only a playground or hell & the boy’s noisy sky come tumbling down, and tracks wide as mom's gnawing voice with her own miles of prickling worry and sickness and want.

Burry rails rise & scratch like a bunny with a pocketful of nails

What can a voice, rails & prickly couch grass beside a yard do but make me sick ,too. The dry crab grass and milky ground sharp with bunny fangs & a stink to make any sensitive child squat and vomit-- bunny vomit of de Chirico’s train

©Conrad DiDiodato 2008