Night Train with Cigarette

“I never paid a tax,” the old man says,
Cups his hand round a match
Guttering in the wind of motion.

He lights and draws,
The train on weary tracks jolting us in synchrony,
Hammering flesh and bone.

The handrolled cigarette flares, etching deeper
The crags and crevices of his life-carved face,
Then fades.

“Oh, sure, sales tax on wine, maybe,” he amends,
“But that don’t count.”
He breathes a plume of smoke, the night whipping it clear. 

Hot wind spirals through the empty boxcar.
Outside, night spreads endless across the Utah flats
Where corpses of salt-encrusted trains rise and pass, wrecked and ghostly in moonlight.

The car leans one way, leans again the other.
“Shit rails,” he explains. “Shit shocks. Same as them,”
Gesturing with the cigarette through the wide door at the parallel derelicts,
Warnings of our possible demise.

Somewhere, another state behind, the rampant blaze of casinos has dimmed to memory.

I still smell the wine on his breath and taste it on my tongue,
But the empty bottle sailed onto the desert an hour past.
Nor did we hear it shatter: the night swallowed it whole.

“And you,” he says to me, “how come you ain’t in school or workin in some damn office?”
“Too many walls,” I say, trying to sound half as weathered as him. “Too many rules.”
He laughs a wheezing laugh, because I am transparent as glass.

“All you upright citizens,” he says, “lookin down your noses at me
Cause I’m drunk half the time, dirty most of the time,
And the rest of the time just fuckin poor.”

He nods knowingly, flicks the meteor of his cigarette butt
Out into the rumbling night, silvering toward a jagged dawn above the distant Rockies.
“No, I never paid a tax,” he says again.
“But then, I never gave a nickel to a war.”

Lawrence Blair Goral
12 June 2024
Bayfield, Colorado