Poetry: Railroad Bridge

Running toward the river, grasses parted

underfoot like knives thrown quick

beneath our feet. (You never could step on a snake

not even if you tried but oh I never tried, not me.)

I lifted feet as high as hell and ran like it

to get to that forbidden tub and to the joy

of pushing off into the coming dark.

Joe, Jack and I would bail and bail

and Ha! those oars, one split, the other short,

but once aboard that rub-a-dub we’d row

and swirl in circles, each one worse at rowing

than the one before.

In fifty strokes or so we’d round

the Cape of Hope and head toward

bridge abutment on the Wheeling line,

tie up, climb onto it, and dip our toes

into the lead of dying day. Not much to say,

we’d sit in coral light and swat.

We’d sit there till the eight-o-two was due.

And then we’d hear her.  Trembling, we would drop

down far beneath the ties to wait.  And she would

come and come until she struck that bridge

right down to its bed rock.

With hope yet fear that one day they would find

us squashed beneath her wheels, we knew

somehow we’d live to tell about the monster’s pass,

to tell just how the cinders spit and

kissed the riverskin.

At last, unbloodied, whole, we’d board again and bail

and by the Greatest Circle Route known

then to man, somehow we’d beach, sprint through

the marsh, and still alive and undiscovered

hightail home.

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Poet Grayce Scholt is a retired Mott Community College English professor who has lived in the East Village since the 1950s. Her recently published book of poems, Bang! Go All the Porch Swings, is available from Amazon and Books-a-Million (online) and from Barnes and Noble (on order). Along with poetry, she wrote art reviews for the Flint Journal.