After night's black abandoned truck-
morning is locked down tight,
and the sky's brewing up
some trouble.

So far at the bottom of this
moment, she could fall off.

Coat hem. A pair
of sultry shoes. She is five.

Small for her age.
Meeting her father for the first

time. Union Station. Denver.
Behind the harsh horizon

beyond the tracks, a dark
wildness over the swing set,

brick yard, development.

Little nowhere, where
Did you come from?

The train roams through
the gone and vanquished,

some pale, soft voice talking.
Spooks. Phantoms.

He is the unclosed
cut of her.

Find the missing
dark scythe. Find

the jawbone of an ass.
Dead wood, cemetery, oil vat

shooed away-harried-
by the train's advance.

First this, then that, then
a thrush's three notes happen

all at once at once at once

and a figure
in a red hat.


About This Poem
"Wordsworth describes a poem as something half remembered, half invented, which this one is. Since I have a very bad memory, I was able to use the images from a recent train trip to Rhode Island as a means of extending and embedding the brief, odd story of meeting my father for the first time, which did indeed happen in a train station."
-Lynn Emanuel

About Lynn Emanuel
Lynn Emanuel is the author of "The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected" (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). She divides her time between Pittsburgh and New York City.

***
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2016 Lynn Emanuel. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate