Woodhaven

During the reading at the library
of my old school, I mentioned
a stone tower throwing light signals
to guide the freight trains’
switchbacks and frog maneuvers
around the railyard in Woodhaven, Michigan.
Afterward, a young Woodhaven woman
approached me and said she didn’t know
you could put Woodhaven in a poem.
She asked where the stone tower
I mentioned was located,
and I confessed I may have
simply imagined a stone railroad tower
existed at the railyard there.
It might be there, she said.
I just haven’t seen it.
She said she’d look for it
when she took her walk that evening.
I said in the poem
that the brakeman switching lights
on and off in that stone tower
was as close as we might come
to defining the word “mind,”
which doesn’t make a lot of sense,
and it is evident I don’t know
exactly what a brakeman does.
Coincidentally, I went to Woodhaven
the following morning.
I read Yeats’s “Tower” on my phone
while looking out the auto-shop window

at the sledding hill of the municipal park,
thinking Ben Bulben’s back.
Thinking about how poems
are really only ever about themselves,
wondering whether the young woman
had begun writing a poem
about the fictitious stone tower
near the railyard in Woodhaven, Michigan,
hoping that she had.
I wandered out into the autumn sunlight
and laughed at myself for using that line
to describe my leaving [my leaving, gerund,
I’m leaving, I’m present participle,
Allen Road, Tom’s Family Auto Care]
and walked to the closed-down Bill Knapp’s Restaurant
on the corner, relieved that the tan
whistle stop sign with the green
cursive lettering is still there.
I took a few pictures of the sign
and the beige building made to resemble
a Midwestern farmhouse.
I wondered how many packs of cigs
Aunt Nancy and her boyfriend, Theron Brown,
smoked while talking about deros
and other Shaverian mysteries.
In his younger days, Theron,
an animator and illustrator by trade,
drew Richard Sharp Shaver’s
air looms and detrimental robots
and thought-stealing welding guns.
Deros in the gears breaking
the transmission while facilitating
darker pneumatic transmissions.
Sparse woods here, a few copses,
some clearings, a little stream
flowing through a culvert.