The Best of Lucius Shepard

White Trains

White trains with no tracks

have been appearing on the outskirts

of small anonymous towns,

picket fence towns in Ohio, say,

or Iowa, places rife with solid American values,

populated by men with ruddy faces and weak hearts,

and women whose thoughts slide

like swaths of gingham through their minds.

They materialize from vapor or a cloud,

glide soundlessly to a halt in some proximate meadow,

old-fashioned white trains with potbellied smokestacks,

their coaches adorned with filigrees of palest ivory,

packed with men in ice cream suits and bowlers,

and lovely dark-haired women in lace gowns.

The passengers disembark, form into rows,

facing one another as if preparing for a cotillion.

and the men undo their trouser buttons,

their erections springing forth like lean white twigs,

and they enter the embrace of the women,

who lift their skirts to enfold them,

hiding them completely, making it appear

that strange lacy cocoons have dropped from the sky

to tremble and whisper on the bright green grass.

And when at last the women let fall their skirts,

each of them bears a single speck of blood

at the corner of their perfect mouths.

As for the men, they have vanished

like snow on a summer’s day.

I myself was witness to one such apparition

on the outskirts of Parma, New York,

home to the Castle Monosodium Glutamate Works,

a town “whose more prominent sophisticates

often drive to Buffalo for the weekend.

I had just completed a thirty-day sentence

for sullying the bail bondsman’s beautiful daughter

(They all said she was a good girl

but you could find her name on every bathroom wall

between Nisack and Mitswego),

and having no wish to extend my stay

I headed for the city limits.

It was early morning, the eastern sky

still streaked with pink, mist threading

the hedgerows, and upon a meadow bordering

three convenience stores and a laundromat,

I found a number of worthies gathered,

watching the arrival of a white train.

There was Ernest Cardwell, the minister

of the Church of the Absolute Solstice,

whose congregation alone of all the Empire State

has written guarantee of salvation,

and there were a couple of cops big as bears

in blue suits, carrying standard issue golden guns,

and there was a group of scientists huddled

around the machines with which they were

attempting to measure the phenomenon,

and the mayor, too, was there, passing out

his card and declaring that he had no hand

in this unnatural business, and the scientists

were murmuring, and Cardwell was shouting

“Abomination,” at the handsome men

and lovely women filing out of the coaches,

and as for me, well, thirty days and the memory

of the bail bondsman’s beautiful daughter

had left me with a more pragmatic attitude,

and ignoring the scientists’ cries of warning and

Cardwell’s predictions of eternal hellfire,

the mayor’s threats, and the cops’ growling,

I went toward the nearest of the women

and gave her male partner a shove and was amazed

to see him vanish in a haze of sparkles

as if he had been made of something insubstantial

like Perrier or truth.

The woman’s smile was cool and enigmatic

and as I unzipped, her gown enfolded me

in an aura of perfume and calm,

and through the lacework the sun acquired

a dim red value, and every sound was faraway,

and I could not feel the ground beneath my feet,

only the bright sensation of slipping inside her.

Her mouth was such a simple curve, so pure

a crimson, it looked to be a statement of principle,

and her dark brown eyes had no pupils.

Looking into them, I heard a sonorous music;

heavy German stuff, with lots of trumpet fanfares

and skirling crescendos, and the heaviness

of the music transfigured my thoughts,

so that it seemed what followed was a white act,

that I had become a magical beast with golden eyes,

coupling with an ephemera, a butterfly woman,

a creature of lace and heat and silky muscle…

though in retrospect I can say with assurance

that I’ve had better in my time.

I think I expected to vanish, to travel

on a white train through some egoless dimension,

taking the place of the poor soul I’d pushed aside,

(although it may be he never existed, that only

the women were real, or that from those blood drops

dark and solid as rubies at the corners of their mouths,

they bred new ranks of insubstantial partners),

but I only stood there jelly-kneed watching

the women board the train, still smiling.

The scientists surrounded me, asking questions,

offering great sums if I would allow them to do tests

and follow-ups to determine whether or not

I had contracted some sort of astral social disease,

and Cardwell was supplicating God to strike me down,

and the mayor was bawling at the cops to take me

in for questioning, but I was beyond the city limits

and they had no rights in the matter, and I walked

away from Parma, bearing signed contracts

from the scientists, and another presented me

by a publisher who, disguised as a tree stump,

had watched the entire proceeding, and now

owned the rights to the lie of my life story.

My future, it seemed, was assured.

White trains, with no tracks

continue to appear on the outskirts

of small anonymous towns, places

whose reasons have dried up, towns

upon which dusk settles

like a statement of intrinsic greyness,

and some will tell you these trains

signal an Apocalyptic doom, and

others will say they are symptomatic

of mass hysteria, the reduction of culture

to a fearful and obscure whimsey, and

others yet will claim that the vanishing men

are emblematic of the realities of sexual politics

in this muddled, weak-muscled age.

But I believe they are expressions of a season

that occurs once every millennium or so,

a cosmic leap year, that they are merely

a kind of weather, as unimportant and unique

as a sun shower or a spell of warmth in mid-winter,

a brief white interruption of the ordinary

into which we may walk and emerge somewhat

refreshed, but nothing more.

I lecture frequently upon this subject

in towns such as Parma, towns whose lights

can be seen glittering in the dark folds of lost America

like formless scatters of stars, ruined constellations

whose mythic figure has abdicated to a better sky,

and my purpose is neither to illuminate nor confound,

but is rather to engage the interest of those women

whose touch is generally accompanied by

thirty days durance on cornbread and cold beans,

a sentence against which I have been immunized

by my elevated status, and perhaps my usage

of the experience is a measure of its truth,

or perhaps it is a measure of mine.

Whatever the case, white trains move silent as thought

through the empty fields, voyaging from nowhere to nowhere,

taking on no passengers, violating

no regulation other than the idea of order,

and once they have passed we shake our heads,

returning to the mild seasons of our lives,

and perhaps for a while we cling more avidly

to love and loves, realizing we inhabit a medium

of small magical transformations that like overcoats

can insulate us against the onset of heartbreak weather,

hoping at best to end in a thunder of agony

and prayer that will move us down through

archipelagoes of silver light to a morbid fairy tale

wherein we will labor like dwarves at the question

of forever, and listen to a grumbling static from above

that may or may not explain in some mystic tongue

the passage of white trains.