Al Ortolani

The Amtrak Out of Lawrence

Tonight, there is a train westbound across Kansas.
A girl is dancing in the aisle for her mother, just
a flicker in the flickering of windows. I would like

to say more about the girl’s dance, or the mother
smiling sleepily at her daughter, but the train is moving fast
and I cannot even be sure there is a dance

or a mother. The train, yes. Absolutely. It wakes
the cattle in the stockyards, forces them to move
a minute back from the gate to the slaughterhouse.

Not that they know any of this. But my mother did.
She was a farm girl, and she was on a train once,
a small girl hurried across the plains towards

her mother and new stepfather, one smiling, the other
counting cattle and mileage. The cost of a ticket
buried in family history and the flicker of windows.

Deer on the Road to Laurie

The more we have aged, the more my wife and I
have become a team. Sometimes when I drive
Purvis Road, especially at dusk, she reads the signs

and I aim the car into the cylinder of twilight
which is the road. Sometimes she isn’t clear
in her instructions, raising her voice an octave

to shout something oblique like there there there
which means I’m missing the turn,
or stop stop stop, more emphatically than the last

which means there’s a deer in the verge,
a young buck I notice as we pass, his antlers blurred
by soft felt. He watches, curious at my slowing,

on a piece of road which holds dusk
more like a river than a blacktop. Even with
the solid yellow lines down the center, I’m thinking

of a canoeist, backpaddling to catch the slot
where the river bends through the trees.
She says I told you to stop, and she did

several times, and I was, but slowly, while looking
at the hillside, how it disappeared into the edge
of the water, how it splashed as the deer entered.