Like - The Sound Of A Distant Train

Guest Post by Chuck Hilton

The time is 12:19am. Late, if you ask me. And if you're still asking me, it’s always late, whatever the time. Yes. Life is a run-on sentence that hangs from its last word over a precipice of borrowed air. But it’s nothing to be sorry about, not at all. For it's here, against the air, careening steadfast over eternity's abyss, where everything in life happens. And would you like to know what just happened minutes ago? I heard from my living room the sound of a distant train, a sound I hear often while I'm taking the pulse of time—a sound I like very much. And I'm lucky. For as long as I've been in Portland, I've lived at a perfect proximity to train-song. I'm not sure what the math is, but there is such a thing as too close, where a train is all mouth and warning and shrill as a knife. And there is such a thing as too far away, where a train murmurs with such dispassion that it may as well quit the scene for good. But a perfectly distant train lets out a soft and heated cry that rises to your ankles in a languid rush, touching you briefly before falling back into silence, mid-sentence. The trains I hear call out to me from the shipyard a few miles away, always evanescent and full of rapture, like dashed lines sounding their last ink. Their voices move through the air on the backs of their own longing, enter my house, and trace unknowable messages into the air. You could say that these sounds aren't crucial; you could say they don't carry the plot. But if you know me at all, you know I'd never say that. To me, the pitch of a distant train is the crux of it all—the whole story in a single breath. It sizes me down to a parenthetical state, and the more dutifully I cast my attention into the parenthesis in the hopes of noticing anything, the more trains I hear. Even while writing this, I’ve heard plenty—a dozen, at least. They've been writing along with me. And if (if!) I could convince an angel to translate the last cadence that just rang out from the shipyard, I'm almost certain the poem would read like this (delivered from a supine state): Twelve. Twelve-forty nine.