Guidebooks won’t tell you, but somewhere south 
of Kankakee an eighty-something Black lady
comes out of her cracker box house along the tracks
to wave the City of New Orleans on its Windy City run,
as she’s done for thirty years. And it’s not one of 
those rotating wrist waves homecoming queens
and attendants do. She’ll wave her wet dishtowel
or head scarf, like a Homer Hankie, still in her pink
bathrobe and slippers, plastic curlers and hairnet.
Guidebooks won’t tell you if she’s got the hots
for the engineer, who gives his air horn three pulls,
or if she’s waving to her porter lover, dead thirty years.
But she’s waving, still with the living on Central Time.
Guidebooks won’t tell you either about Ribera, NM,
on the Southwest Chief line to Albuquerque;
but the Irish bar car attendant on that Amtrak run will—
how it’s a town known for doghouses and dogs.
The doghouses run along the tracks and dogs run out
to meet the Southwest Chief, whose conductor
boards at La Junta and tosses out big milk bones
on his day run past Ribera.  It’s not said he ever met
or knows any dogs by name. Patrick in the bar car,
renowned for his Thermonuclear Bloody Mary,
holds that card close to his vest. But set your clocks
back, you’re running with the dogs. It’s Mountain Time.

© 2005 by Chet Corey. All rights reserved.