David Allen SullivanOur dream trains conjure up faces—
known, unknown. You half-recognise
a tired mother; I sneer at my drunk uncle
who never got to the other side of his third
marriage. We pack our dream trains with
all we’ve come through.
There’s another,
evanescent earth intersecting, punching
through—endlessly—the way colonisers
belted countries with rails. Dreams
turned into nightmares.
The dead are
resurrected in our memories of them.
Our minds grow porous when floodwaters
come. Gutters so full they choke on hiccups
of air, as in your Mumbai, where train hanger
ons flap wetly, facing destinations.
My friend,
was that you got caught in monsoon rains as
you followed your father to the dark roofs of
his drinking den, oblivious of how
he failed your family?
When our minds give
out, we’ll still be using our caught breath
to say what we can to each other, to do the
spirit-work we’re given, to harness the dead’s
inexhaustible voices—to be in the revenant
listening, wheels churning beneath our swaying.
