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Slack Action
Jeffery Donaldson
It goes through my mind like a train at night,
the train my father rode in the night, his mind
a train of thought far from where he rode.
When I pull into the seniors' home I like to feel
another touch to come nearer, the braking slide
into parking easements and an end. Forty-two
years he leapt among the tracks, nights, to cobble（修）
free of his uncouplings. It took some sorting out.
He listened hard for the word come down
from the Dispatcher. Too heavy now for the staff,
staring in disbelief. I am borne here. For us,
mother and wife are let go, the love-ties
grappled loose in unbroken entanglements,
When the sliding door whispers open for me
-- in hand his double-double and an apple fritter,
unlooked-forward-to, like a pill that you take --
Our family is convergence and divergence13（收敛与发散） both.
I have a photograph of him in mind, a man
in his prime leaning out from the boxcar's ladder,
signalling ahead the slow recessions, the gaps
and clearances14, the thrown switches and coupler
knuckles ... ten feet and closing, five feet, good.
His grief looks poor on him. Plan was he'd be
the first to go -- with drinks and smokes, half by
his own wishing -- and Mum's years would ease
ahead of him by whole decades. But after
Alzheimer's and a kidney ache, her body still shining
with something fifty about it went off and left him
those seemingly endless trains he assembled
in the night, a hundred cars and counting,
how, when the engine pulls up a little
it must be that all the fastenings along
let up in turn and spread fresh gaps throughout.
Cars and clusters of cars at once go
clutching and unclutching down their length.
unravelling, their reciprocal momentums
would meet and intermingle, the forward push
backing into slows, and the slows pulling off
and you would hear the whole thing down the line
at once parting and gathering, the entire train
getting on, undecided. But how too, if you really
listened for it, there would be single cars hidden
nor pulled, left gentled into hiatus（裂缝）, coasting free
his pantomimed 'Look who it is!' and we embrace,
our private journeys sallying up behind us
in opposite directions, gently coupling. Not
a greeting or farewell, but a staying that is
neither between us. He keeps me close, and not
thinking about the train. 'Slack action, it's called,'
he says, and lets his arms fall open around me.
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