The Waiting Dream

Enslaved by circumstances, to wait, without vanity, uncalculating and available, for the whim of the marketplace, to wait, without pleasure, for routine or for chance.

—Joyce Mansour, “Practical Advice for Waiting”
(Translated by Myrna Bell Rochester)

The train crouches like a gun.
Anachronistic steam from air brakes
frosts parallel gray rails.
Above—the traditional dusty glass,
thick air rising from a line
of the frightened humans waiting here.

On the platform, a desk. You hear
wheezing lungs—an old gun
squeezing a bullet into the chamber. The line
is frozen—a glacier—it breaks
like an icicle, like gray glass
overhead when rain falls like steel rails

in winter. Looking down, you see one rail
is crooked, twisted, and over here,
a spike’s rusting. There’s a fine dust of glass
covering cinders, dark and bright as gun-
powder. Even you know the brakes
will fail. You shuffle along with the line:

One step and stop. Those blue lines
on that page on the desk are trails
of unreadable names with no breaks
between consonants. They mean nothing here—
A broken alphabet of notches on a gun.
Stand up straight and focus on the split glass

of your bifocals. Don’t think about the last glass
of wine you’ll ever know or the hairline
fracture in your knee. She didn’t fire the gun
on purpose. Behind you someone starts to rail
against injustice—as if anyone could hear.
Others laugh, loud and sharp as ungreased brakes.

An order is given. Movement. Try not to break
into a sweat or tears: A perfect glass
chess piece moving from there to here
under a cold hand that understand this line
of attack. Walk straight until the rails—
cool and blue as the barrel of a gun—

split you into a new line. The kiss of air brakes.
A dull glare from the rails. All that broken glass.
A gun firing a shot you’ll never hear.

Mark J. Mitchell studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver, George Hitchcock, and Barbara Hull. His work has appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies. It has also been nominated for both Pushcart Prizes and The Best of the Net. His book Lent 1999 is new from Leaf Garden Press, and his chapbook, Three Visitors, won the Negative Capability Press Chapbook Competition in 2010. Artifacts and Relics, another chapbook, was just released by Folded Word, and his novel, Knight Prisoner, is available from Vagabondage. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the documentarian and filmmaker Joan Juster.