In Which Metaphor Is Used As A Rhetorical Device

In the last post I mentioned my uneasiness with the transition between college and not-college. It's an uneasiness that began as far back as this time last year and has increased exponentially until now. Even at this point, when I've started working and pretty much completely removed myself from college life, there are some days when I wake up and can't believe it's over. There's a big part of me - the rational, thinking part - that knows I wouldn't even enjoy being there if I still had the opportunity; I started being bored with classes early during my final semester, so I can only imagine that my tolerance for them now would be nil. But there's another part of me - the emotional part - that longs for the order, the stability, the familiarity of being a college student. I have to remind myself, sometimes, of how scared I was when I first started college; how, for those first few weeks at least, (that first semester, even) I was grasping for something that would keep me grounded. And though I have to believe that what I'm going through now is a lot like that, I can't yet escape the feeling that this, what's happening now, is a whole new world - and not in a Disney kind of way.

There's a poem I love that I think really captures the essence of what I am feeling, maybe more than I can verbalize myself. It's by a poet named Tony Hoagland; for those who are maybe averse to poetry for the reason that it is difficult to understand, I would strongly recommend him. His poetry, while easily understandable, is also so poignant, so true. Anyway, here it is.

Two Trains

by Tony Hoagland

Then there was that song called "Two Trains Running,"
a Mississippi blues they play on late-night radio,
that program after midnight called FM in the AM,
--well, I always thought it was about trains.

Then somebody told me it was about what a man and woman do
under the covers of their bed, moving back and forth
like slow pistons in a shiny black locomotive,
the rods and valves trying to stay coordinated

long enough that they will "get to the station"
at the same time. And one of the trains
goes out of sight into the mountain tunnel,
but when they break back into the light

the other train has somehow pulled ahead,
the two trains running like that, side by side,
first one and then the other, with the fierce white
bursts of smoke puffing from their stacks,
into a sky so sharp and blue you want to die.

So then for a long time I thought the song was about sex.

But then Mack told me that all train songs
are really about Jesus, about how the second train
is shadowing the first, so He walks in your footsteps
and He watches you from behind, He is running with you,

He is your brakeman and your engineer,
your coolant and your coal,
and He will catch you when you fall,
and when you stall He will push you through
the darkest mountain valley, up the steepest hill,

and the rough chuff chuff of His fingers on the washboard
and the harmonica woo woo is the long soul cry by which He
pulls you through the bloody tunnel of the world.
So then I thought the two trains song was a gospel song.

Then I quit my job in Santa Fe and Sharon drove
her spike heel through my heart
and I got twelve years older and Dean moved away,
and now I think the song might be about good-byes--

because we are not even in the same time zone,
or moving at the same speed, or perhaps even
headed towards the same destination--
forgodsakes, we are not even trains!

What grief it is to love some people like your own
blood, and then to see them simply disappear;
to feel time bearing us away
one boxcar at a time.

And sometimes, sitting in my chair
I can feel the absence stretching out in all directions--
like the deaf, defoliated silence
just after a train has thundered past the platform,

just before the mindless birds begin to chirp again
--and the wildflowers that grown beside the tracks
wobble wildly on their little stems,
then gradually grow stil land stand

motherless and vertical in the middle of everything.