Train of Consciousness

By Jim Janus

In the nighttime I hear the freight train, hear it fade off, and I see the back of the last car, the old-time caboose, I see it go into the dark until I can’t see it, and I hear it fading and each night I imagine it going into the country somewhere, just that one long train of boxcars and tankers and flatbeds clacking across the plains in the dark sometimes past a single crossing gate the two red lights taking turns, one on the other off, the other on the one off. It keeps going past trees, past rivers, near mountains. The passenger trains take the same tracks but I know where they’re going, one unromantic suburban stop after another. Til it gets as far as Fox River Grove, I think it is, and the conductor kicks out who’s ever left, the engineer walks from the engine, through the cars, to the last car which becomes the first car, and he drives it back to the city.