The Boy and the Mountain
Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad?
Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them
[…]. They are sound sleepers, I assure you.
―Henry David Thoreau
Tissack, the soles of my shoes are worn,
day is turning to night and I am cold
as reptile eyes. I watch the sky crack
the moon apart over the plates in your skull,
gauze them in Tule fog. The sun has drawn
its glow down the blue skin of your neck
and on past your gold-rush homes, each one
a snail to your mighty foothills
where my father sleeps among the track-ties,
under the slack and snap of the narrow gauge,
his bones echoing like pipes: their hollow, hollow sound.
Elisabeth Sennitt Clough lives in Norfolk with her husband and three children. In 2014 she won first prize in the Portico Brotherton Competition and third prize in the PENfro Competition. She has just written her first pamphlet.