Conclusions of the Railroad Earth

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Oh baby, baby Oh baby, baby I'm going to give you the railroad blues Oh baby, baby I'd put a block of wood under the wheels of the car And watch it writhe and crack as the car eased up on it and stopped And sometimes didn't at all but just rolled on Leaving the wood flattened to the level of the rail With upthrusted cracky ends Afternoons in hometown long ago I'd wondered What the grimy men were doing With the big boxcars and blocks of wood in their hands And when far above the big ramps and rooftops Of the great gray warehouse of eternity I'd see the immortal canal clouds of red brick time The drowse so heavy in the whole July city It would hang even in the dank gloom of our father's shop Which was a printing shop Outside where they kept big roll trucks With little wheels and flat slivery platforms And junk and corners and boards The ink dyed into the oily wood as deep as a black river Folded therein forever Contrasts for the white puff cream clouds outdoors That you just can see Standing in the dust-moted hall door Over the old 1790 Lowell Dickens redbrick Floating like in an old cartoon with little bird designs Floating by too All of it a gray daguerreotype mystery In the whirly spermy waters of the canal Thus in the same way the afternoons In the Southern Pacific redbrick alley in San Francisco Remembering my wonder at the slow grinding movement And squeal of gigantic boxcars, the flats and gons Rolling by with that overpowering steel dust Crenching closh and clack of steel on steel The shudder of the whole steely proposition A car going by with the brake on And the whole rattling rig rattling like a ghost The monstrous empowderings of iron on iron In hell, in the frightening fog nights in California When you can see through the mist And the monsters slowly passing And hear the whee whee squeal Those merciless wheels That one time conductor Roy Haynes or Roy Brooks From my student trip said "Jack when those wheels go over your leg They don't care about you" Same way with that wood that I sacrifice What those grimy men had been doing Some of them standing on top of boxcars And signaling far down the redbrick alley canals of Lowell And some old men slowly like bums Moving around over rails with nothing to do The big cutter cars squeening by With that teeth gritting cree cree And gigantic hug steel bending rails into earth And making ties move Now I knew from working as on the Sherman local On Sundays we dealt with blocks of wood Because of an incline in the ground That made kick cars stop going And you have to ride them, brake them And stop them with your blocks Lessons I learned like "Boy put tie a good brake on him We don't want to start chasing that son of a gun Back down to the city when we kick a car again, him Ok, but I'm playing the safety rules of the safety book I've been reading the safety book every night All night long to the T" And so now here I am in the rear man On the Sherman local We've set out our Sunday morning preacher blossom car Flowers and made curtseys, bows, sabbath, god, tin Everything has been arranged in that fashion And according to the old traditions Reaching back to Sutter's Mill Times when the pioneers sick of hanging around The hardware store all week Did hang around and put on their best vestments And smoked and jaw bleaked in front of the old wooden church And on railroad men of the 19th Century The inconceivably ancient Southern Pacific of another era With stovepipe hats, flowers in their lapels And had made the moves with a few cars In the gold town milk bottle With a great formality archaic as shame Crowds of watchers bederbied in the gloom Like old waiters in the rain of time All galleried and posed in historic inkSorrowful as Jews 'Murica stand Gave the sign, kicked the car with a wooden hand I run out, the old conductor yells "You better brake that hand Because he's gonna go now as fast as you can get him!" Okay I run and take it easy on the jog And wait, and here's the big car looming over me That just switched into its track from the locomotive track Where, the lead, all the angling and arrowing is being done by the Conductor Who throws the switch, reads the tag list, throws the switch So up the rungs I go And according to safety rules, which I read in the safety rule book With one hand, I hang on With the other, I brake Slowly According to a joint Easing up With the other I brake Till I reach the cutter cars waiting And into it, gently, my braked boxcar Bangs Zom Vibrations Things inside shake The cradled, rock-a-bye-baby merchandise zoms with it All the cars at this impact go forward about a foot And crush wood blocks that I'd earlier placed I jump down, place a block of wood, and just neatly glue it Under the steel lip of the monstrous wheel, and everything stops So I turn back to take care of the next kicked car Which is going down the other track, and also quite fast I jog, finding wood en route Run up the rung Stop it Safety rules, hanging on with one hand, forgetting The conductors tie a good brake on it The conductor said to me Something I should've learned then As a year later in Guadalupe, hundreds of miles down the line I tied poor brakes on three gondolas The old gondola handbrakes that have old rust and loose chains Poorly, with one hand, safety wires hanging And in one case an unexpected joint Which would jolt me off And under the merciless wheels, under whose action With blocks of wood, my bones would be a lie Bam! At Guadalupe, they kicked the cutter Cars against my poorly braked gongs Everything began parading down that incline back to San Luis Obispo If it hadn't been for the alert old Conductor looking out in this one sentence Or to throw the switches in front of it and unlock the switch locks As fast as the cars kept coming Kinda comic circus act With him in floppy clown pants and hysterical horror Darting from switch to stand to switch to stand And the guys in back are hollering The pot taking off after the cut and catching it almost Pushing it into the couplers because they closed just in time And the engine breaking everything to a stop It got my comma Thirty—thirty-five feet almost in front of the final D rail Which would The old winded cor—conductor couldn't have finally made Which the old winded conductor couldn't have finally made, comma We'd all have lost our jobs My safety rule brakes Had not taken momentum of steel and Slight land inclines into consideration If it had been Sherman at Guadalupe I would have been hated calloway