I Am What I Remember

Myron Ernst

I am creosote, memory’s sweet acridity oozing from the ties of a railroad bed, and I am a black steam locomotive, its mysterious pauses and seething, and now I am its smoke poured across a rising field, and the runner after it. I am pistons and bitter rail dust, the clanging of rods and wheels and the blazing of fireboxes; I am one who listens, awake in the small hours, for distant hisses and whistles; who starts at metal to metal’s hushed couplings, and at the ringing of faint bells.