"Somewhere Tonight as the Train"

by  Mike Chasar

Somewhere tonight as the train stitches East

from the mountains, a priest is preparing the Mass,

shining the chalice and holding the un-blessed bread

and un-blessed wine, the not-yet-body and not-yet-blood,

and as he prepares, the mystery of his faith is summoned

and stretches before him.  And only because no one is

watching, and only because his church is a tomb

and the altar a block of Italian marble, he

holds up the bread and holds up the

wine and whispers this is my

body and blood as he's

blankly promised

from Sunday

to Sunday

for years

and all

of a

sud-

den,

with no

eyes upon him,

his body is suddenly rocked.

*

Somewhere tonight as the train stitches East,

men in painted bodies, men in painted faces,

men with bones in their cheeks,

circle a cauldron and chant.  Inside a ring

they simmer the stew and stoke the flames,

their bodies are movement and shadow, their spears

propped at the rim are a series of rays from the sun.

The elders are eager and hungry,

the women and children are eager and hungry --;

the ladle is lifted and bowls are passed,

the stew is poured and they relish the heat as it passes

their lips and they feel it descend through their throats

and into their guts which recoil and slowly recover.

So the body is eaten, dispersed, and destroyed;

So it lives on.

*

Some
where tonight
as the train stitches
East through Montana
an elderly man is
explain-
ing how
every dawn the bodies of Japanese soldiers were tied to the bumpers
of jeeps and dragged on the rocks on top of the ridge
till their features wore
off.  Every dawn
this post-mortem
hanging, a body
selected at ran-
dom from a
wet pile.  A
body to stand
for all bodies.
A body may
look like a
body, he
says, but not
be a body.

*

I'm afraid of the body

As the train stitches East and the drugs help you sleep,
more than ever before I'm afraid.

I'm telling you this,

that I left while you slept and I fled
the darkness of sitting beside you.

                                                            Only the train-

as I swayed down the aisle past rows
of people asleep with their gorgeous mouths open,

their ugly mouths open,
their skinny and fat mouths open -

only the train was alive.  And I wondered why we
can't leave 'em behind,

make ourselves hoops
of stars in a painting or trees entwined in a tale;

Certainly Ovid
feared the body as I.

*

I will tell you some day how I met,
in the lounge car,

                        a man with a six-string he said

he'd restored.
A year and a half of rebuilding

he said, and the body will never be perfect.

Temperature changes its sound
altitude changes its sound

and the trainride from Portland, up

through the mountains and over the buttes of Montana

has it singing the blues.  Oh how I wish you could see
his practiced caress and the way
its hourglass fit on his thigh. . . .

                                                But look,

its body was hollow.  He kept it like something
whose body is hollow,
so surely, so easy, I fled.

One day I'll tell you I re-found my seat next to you
in the dark.  I want you to know I was holding
your hand and touching your cheek,

afraid for us both as the train,
back to the world from the mountains and buttes,

flatlined into Chicago.