Mark Rudman
March 2006

If It Had to Be Maybe It Wasn't Wasted


My love
                        letter was interrupted before it had begun.
An accident superseded the accident I had set out to relate
to let you know why I have found-lost-myself in

the very situations I predicted would occur if I put my trust in the trains:
the New York to Boston run that these silvered machines can yawn-half-
sleep through between quick routine stops at classic stations, New

Haven, Providence, which cause memories to run riot as the train’s
first suicide forged ahead of schedule while the conductors took a last
nicotine hit and breath of cold air before they got back on,

while I was assaulted with hoof beats and smells from the riding gear
my first real lover let fall as she entered our bedroom
after her morning ride on winter mornings far colder than this one and our

heat intermingled with the intoxicating mesh of horses, leather, and flesh,
I wished the immersion was prelude to what the earth would reveal
the deeper I delved.  I hoped she kept up with her riding

and not the pain she fastened on me to escape. 
She was my first love, I her second: her first had taken his life
the night before he was to be shipped out to Vietnam.

The man had donned a gray sweat suit and painted horizontal stripes
to reduce any chance an alert engineer might sense
an obstruction and reach for his desert war issue night vision

equipped binoculars in time to phone the rescue crew at the next junction
who would still be retrieving the scatter: the ill-defined mixture of hard
matter and soft, brains, bones, limbs, mostly female from the waist up,

male from there on down, body after body the ticket taker confesses, quietly,
checking to see no one’s eavesdropping as I, in as low key a manner I can manage
ask about the hows and whys.  Holiday

season never fails to bring them out.  Just last week a man stood
eye to eye with the conductor: he couldn’t bear to watch the explosion;
nor could he avert or close his eyes at the moment of impact, not with

passengers at risk and he, solely responsible. I tried to draw him out about todays
reoccurrence—the reason we were twice delayed. Maybe
later.  It makes me ill to—.  You don’t have to explain.

I’m thinking about how the conductor goes on.
And if there’s an element of vengeance in forcing witnesses to see
the carnage.  More and more all the time: the suicides began

to multiply as if wreaking vengeance on the axiom be
fruitful and multiply, and it hits me: trains and tracks and axioms
have so many sounds in common, they might have met

through a personal ad or on the net, and as I rise to stretch
and walk the aisle I see young couples, eyes
focused on lap top screens, who look like they mean

business, which hardly cancels out multitasking,
and who can be sure that the strangers seated next to each other,
separated by an arm rest! aren’t exchanging information

about who they really are and what they’re looking for
at this instant utterly unaware that the intimate contact
they find so hard to find, the nearness they need to heal,

requires only that they see each other face to face,
and what better time than now, as today’s next
suicide hurled himself from the upper platform just before impact,

whose suddenness made for whiplash, electric
connections severed, computer
screens mauled, ribs fractured against trays, possible

concussions, and a shriek announcing that scalding
hot coffee “scalded my face! help!” and scarring other
uncovered skin—but not of those two who now

apply themselves to looking each other over for signs of—
in a slow, deliberate way that mimicked intimacy.
They each nod: he looks fine to her and she to him;

they sigh, exchange smiles, hold hands.
“You did miss something. 
The black coffee on my black skirt.”