Onion Songs

THE SADNESS

It creeps up on you out of the North, like some dark and suspicious groundwater, risen through the lost ruins of forgotten basements. When finally it takes form it is too tall, its folded hands too soft. It waits patiently beneath the dark trees: this malaise, this disappointment, this sadness.

You have waited for your family at the station for days. Their train has been delayed, you have been told it is the earthquakes in the Midwest, or the floods, or the wild fires. A storm has settled over the eastern seaboard and the birds do not know where to land.

Your youngest daughter cannot travel without nightmares. Your son cannot live long without the medicine a specialist provides. Your wife says she loves you but you are never sure. The waiting room is full of people who look at you with faces paled by fear.

At the edge of the platform a small boy tosses dead mice out onto the track as if seeding a sacrifice. Behind you the windows of the station have filled with weeping. Overhead the birds glide by in slow motion, still reluctant to land.

You make yourself smile and tell jokes to an old man with a cane. He taps it so rapidly against the planks you imagine some nervous disorder. Out on the platform a conductor collects tickets, tears them apart and tosses them out to join the mice. The wind blows several pieces back toward your face where they land and twitch. Gray moths, you think, as a number gather to make a beard across your chin.

All night long a distant train wails its distress but comes no closer. During the heat of the day the people who wait on the platform stretch out on the warm boards and sleep.

It is too late to be surprised, you think. It is too late to devise a backup plan. You have made so many mistakes, you think, when the sadness embraces you with its empty sleeves, an unspoken dread in the hollow of its mouth.