GOODBYE, TRAIN

I’m stepping off the train behind a pair

of thirtysomethings with their baby daughter.

The father will stay fit for years, I think,

though here and there, his hair’s a little thin;

the mother’s confident in new blue jeans

she knows are sexy—but carefully, tastefully so.

Seeing them floods me at once—I can’t say why—

with solicitude. Delight, and envy. Pain.

“Goodbye, train,” the mother says, and then,

“Say ‘goodbye, train,’ ‘bye bye.’” She waves her hand

theatrically, the way we often will

with children, so that nobody can find us

guilty, ourselves, of any silliness—

of joy in the trainman’s cap, his ticket-punch.

The little girl is propped on her father’s hip

and pointing vaguely at a world of things

she’s just come to know, and which now must go away.

How grave she seems!—a toothless oracle.

I see too how I look, if anyone’s looking:

a weathered niceness, a trudging competence.

That’s how I follow, twenty years ahead

of the parents, as I lug my bags behind them,

vowing to keep a stranger’s proper distance—

as I did from those two lovesick teenagers

clinging in tears some stations back, when he

prepared himself to be left there on the platform

by a girl who swore it wasn’t possible,

and both were stunned to discover that it was.

I think what luck it is, to be one who says

goodbye to trains instead of other people.

        from A Phone Call to the Future (2008)