Claudia Emerson

1 Claude says he, too, was given the tracks and not the train, the way — and not the way out, not the beyond beyond that bend, or the next. The place they call Drybridge — for the waterless bed of rails — where on the banks, you grow up learning more news from hoboes than from the mailman. But you know nothing of the train as it passes behind the backs of grander houses, gutted warehouses, chained dogs, as it grazes an alien grid of fences — of stone, metal, and chain-link. Or that when it passes beneath the underside of a bridge, a boy your own age waves the way you do, and that there is a horse doesn’t lift its head, and one that does, only to lower it again. 2 You are a grown man when the train comes to a scalding stop, and a lantern swings down the road. A man has been killed, they call out from behind the light’s aura, and would you come see what you can tell of him by what’s left. You do know his hat, and that burn scar on the back of his hand. What you know of his wife you do not say and will not even the next night when you sit up with the body in the house he wanted that much shut of, her voice rigid as its walls while the train you hear out there in the darkness passes by the way it always does, as though the same, the very same, and, again, on the time it will this night be able to keep.

It nuzzles oblivion, confuses itself with mud. A creature of familiar taste, it ambushes from its nest of ooze the pond's brighter fish, clears its palate with their eggs, lumbers fat and stagnant into winter, lulled into dreams of light sinking until light drowns, and all is as before.

When Claude says blessed is he who has seen and believes, you know he is about to tell the one about bees. His father told him which kind of sting was worst, but you have to see some things for yourself, and when you ask how on earth do you catch a bee to see anything, he tells how you hunker down next to a sweet potato blossom and watch until one lands on the ruffled cuff and then ambles down into the sweeter sleeve. You lean over and pinch the blossom shut, and there you have it, ready to sting yourself so you can decide on your own, and he wants for you not to doubt this: even more blessed, you will be, you have heard — and not seen.