Night-train noises, muffled and low,
nights when the Northern Limited left.
Midnights, we’d hear its strange chord blow,
a distant dissonance, treble-cleft.
Languid in summer, dulled in snow,
it spoke to me calmly: Trust and rest.
The night world works on a steady clock.
The barges ride on the river’s crest;
at port in Duluth, the grain ships dock,
and a streetlamp lit at the end of the block
looks in at the window’s blind from the west–

I never learned: Did the schedule skew
departure times into daylight hours,
or did neighbors grouse, as neighbors do,
that living close to a loud sound sours
tempers and lives? I never knew,
but it’s not there now, though we still see track.
The freeway sound and the freeway grime
color the nights. The snow turns black,
and the block club frets over rising crime,
and the sweet illusion of changeless time,
though I wish for it fiercely, will not come back.

*****

Maryann Corbett writes: “When I wrote this poem, I was still participating on online poetry boards. I recall that there was a certain amount of argument about what a train–horn or whistle?–actually sounds like. The disappearance of the nightly sound has, in fact, a prosaic explanation: the schedule did change, and the station itself was moved to a downtown location. The name of the train route is fictional, chosen for alliterative purposes.”

‘Lament for the Midnight Train’ was first published in The Times (UK, online); appeared in the chapbook ‘Dissonance’; and is collected in ‘Street View’.

Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota in 1981 and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry after thirty years away from the craft in 2005 and is now the author of two chapbooks and six full-length collections, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan U. Press, 2023). Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry.

Photo: “The Midnight Train To Georgia….” by tvdflickr is licensed under CC BY 2.0.