The Rail Shed

                          for my father

     Midway through we descended a long ramp
     and found our shoes buried in a strange mulch: fire-
     parched timetables, washers, wrenches, coal ash 
     that crunched, coke that, stopped on, chimed like pumice. 
     Ripped tea-bags loosed spores, & through the ballast 
     sprouted carriage bolts & rivets with awful 
     bloated heads. Dust & dusk-grains floated about 
     as though one stirred a glass of sand. Light drizzled 
     through chinks in the corrugated roof. Such 
     stenches were there: creosote, spilt oil, spoiled 
     moon-yellow milk in cracked bowls for skinny 
     cats that slinked along, or coiled between, split 
     ties. A horrid resin bled from the downed 
     trunks of engines: bile-yellow axle grease 
     and rust that streaked windows or rimed leaf-springs 
     and bough-pistons--who knew what beasts slept in 
     boiler pipes end-to-end like a seam of bees 
     in a roof beam--what canvas wings unhinged 
     at night to feed upon huge spoked wheels, blossoms 
     of brass & iron. At the yard end the light 
     was stainless, burning the eyes at first. Rails curved 
     away there, braiding together till they spliced 
     into the branch line proper. In the sun 
     the polished iron gleamed like rivulets of ice.

                                          Sheffield Park, England

     Martin Walls
 	

     
     *         *          *
        

     about the poem:

     "The rail shed I write of in this poem can be found in Sussex, 
     England, at the Bluebell Railway Preservation Society's Sheffield 
     Park train station.  The Bluebell is one of the oldest steam 
     preservation societies in the world; if any reader watches British 
     period TV programs, you are likely to have seen the Bluebell in 
     station shots, as it is extensively used for set location work.       
     My father has volunteered at the Bluebell as a carpenter since his 
     retirement from the British civil service.  I have been going to see 
     the trains since I can remember.  The poem, therefore, arose out of 
     my memories, and the structure and images I use to frame the memories 
     came to me after reading Dante's Inferno.  It is, then, a brief journey
     through hell--the awesome, frightening, beautiful locomotives appearing 
     as they might to very young eyes."



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