Beyond the Other Tracks

An object only comes to rest
when it finds some spot of solitude.

Coming back from Kyoto
after improvising and talking long
about Being, tuning the self,
suicide and death,
my train slows, stops and then creeps
past a train stopped on the other tracks.

I watch from my window,
staring in at the various little cultures
happening in the other train's cars:
a middle aged man sprawled out
and sleeping on a long bench;
a group of high school boys
leaning far out their windows
to see where they just came from;
slouching passengers sitting with
the drained-faced looks of forced patience.

My train slides on, leaving the other
and comes to a humming industrial light
pouring its brightness down on a blue tarp
shaping a woman's body.

The body has been made soft enough to fold
over the right angles of a concrete drainage ditch,
a body that perhaps 20 minutes before
could climb the fence beside the sidewalk
and time its leap in front of that now stopped
local train towards Kyoto.

This thought makes me
wonder about that leap and its actual details.
For example, did she land
on the ground between the rails
already ringing with the train's approach?
And thus, did she land standing
or just come down already falling?
And, if she landed on her feet,
did she feel any sense of accomplishment--
some twinge of successful physicality--
or was it just one more pulse
of irony or futility to drive her
into the train's embrace?
Did she turn towards or away from
the train's light and its unobstructable momentum?

It was obvious in my glance and recognition
of the body half-poured into the gutter,
it was knocked back off the tracks.
But who knows after how much
interaction with the train?
The emergency trucks didn't gather
where she climbed the fence.
She was transported by the energies
and logics of physics, but I wonder about
her final immeasurable moments of thought
and perception. Did she hear the beauty of
the Dopler effect or her name spoken
in one of the tongues of her mind? Did she
sense a release or the approach of punishment?
Did she build one final memory before becoming
lost to herself and wholly gone?




by jerry gordon
suicide on the Hankyu Kyoto line
5.6.09