Conclusion of the Railroad Earth

Oh 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 ride 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 up-trusted cracky ends
afternoons in hometown long ago I wondered
what the grimy men
were doing with the big box cars and blocks of wood
in their hands
and far above the big ramps and rooftops of the great grey warehouse of eternity
I'd see the immortal canal clouds of red beck 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 junket 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 conceived
standing in a dust-moded hall door over the old [?]
Lowell
Dickens
redbrick floating like in an old cartoon
little bird designs going by too
all of it, the grey degaratite mystery in the whirly spermy waters of the canal
thus, in the same way the afternoons in Southern Pacific redbrick alley in San Francisco remembering my wonder at slow-grinding move and squeeze of gigantic boxcars flats and gones rolling by with that overpowering steel dust clenching clush and clack of steel on steel
the shutter of the whole steely proposition
a car going by with a brake-on and a whole rattling rig rattling like a ghost
the monsters and powderings of iron on iron
and hell
in the frightening fault nights in California
when you can see through the mist
and the monsters slowly passing
and hear the whee-whee squee
those merciless wheels
that one time conducted Roy Haynes or Roy Brooks
and 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 boxcars and signaling far down the redbrick alley canals of Lowell
and some old men snoring like bums
moving around over rails with nothing to do
the big cutter cars squeeing by with that teeth-gritting cree-cree
the gigantic huck-steel bending rails into Earth
and making ties move
now, I knew from workin' on the Sherman local on Sundays we dealt with boxes of wood because of incline in the ground that made kick cars stop going you had to ride them brake them and stop them with your blocks
lessons i learned like,
Boy, put tie and good brake on him
we don't wanna start chasin' that son of a gun
back down to the city when we kick the car again
Okay, but I'm playin' the safety rules of the safety book
I been readin' the safety book every night all night long
to the T
listen now here I am and the rear man on the Sherman local and set out in Sunday morning preacher blossom car
flowers and made curtsies bow sabbath God tin
everything's been arranged and then fashioned accordin' to old traditions reached in the back of the Sutter's Mill
times when the pioneers sick of hangin' around the hardware store all week
didn't hang around and put on their best vestments and spoked and jaw-bleaked in front of the old wooden church
and railroad men of the 19th century inconceivably ancient Southern Pacific of another era
bestow five hats flowers in their lapels
had made the moves with a few cars with the old-town milk bottle with the great formality archaic ashamed
crowds of watchers bederbied in the gloom
like old waiters in the rain of time
all galleried and posed in historic ink
sorrowful as Jews
America stained
gave the sidekick a car with a wooden head I run out the old conductor yells you better break that head because he's gonna go down as fast as you can get him
Okay! I run and take it easy on the jog and waiting his with the big car looming over me
just switched in through its tracks and locomotive tracks
where the lead,
all the angling and arrowing's being done by the conductor
who throws the switch reads the track list throws the switch
so up the rungs I go and according to the safety rules which I read in the safety rule book with one hand I hang on
with the other I break, slowly, according to the joints, easing up, with the other I brake, till I reach the cut of cars waiting and into gently my braked boxcar bangs, zom
Vibrations
Things inside shake, the cradled rockaby baby merchandise zoms with it all the cars that this impact goes forward about a foot and crush woodblocks that I'd earlier placed
I jump down place a block of wood and just neatly glue it under the steel lip of that monster's wheel and everything stops
So I turn back to take care of the next kick car which is going down the other track and also quite fast, I jog, finding wood on route, run up the rung, stop it, safety rules hanging on one half and getting the [?] tie a good brake on it, conductor said to me something I should've learned then as a year later in [?] hundreds of miles down the line I tied four breaks on three gondolas, the old gondola handbrakes that had old rust and loose chains
[?] with one hand safety-wise hanging and in one case it's unexpected joint which would jolt me off, and under the merciless wheels under whose action, blocks of wood my bones would be lie
Bam!
at Guadalupe they kick the cutter cars against my poorly-braked guns
everything began brake down that brake line back to St. Louis-Obispo
[?] for the alerto conductor looking out just one sentence
oh 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 in hysterical horror
darting from switch-to-stand to switch-to-stand
and the guys in back are hollerin'
the pot taking off after the cut and catching it almost and pushing it into the couplers because they'd close just in time the engine braking everything to a stop
good god almighty,
thirty thirty five feet almost in front of the final D-rail
which would
the old winded conductor couldn't have finally made
which the old winded conductor couldn't have finally made,
but all have lost our jobs
my safety rule breaks
and not taken momentum of steel and slight inclines into consideration
if it had been Sherman and Guadalupe, I woulda been hated and cutaway