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Jared Smith’s 16th volume of poetry will be released by New York Quarterly Books this spring. His work has appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies in this country and abroad over the past 45 years, and has been featured on NPR and New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. He is Poetry Editor of Turtle Island Quarterly, and has served on the editorial boards of such journals as The New York Quarterly, Home Planet News, and The Pedestal Magazine, as well as on the boards of directors of arts and literary non-profits in New York, Illinois, and Colorado.

Jared Smith

Call it a Train

Let’s say a train is rushing toward you
and the engineer is drinking a bottle of Red Ball whiskey.
You are not aware of it because the tracks curve
over the horizon where autumn leaves are golden
and the rails themselves are so hard and inscrutable.
It’s a long way off and you are holding a butterfly
perched on your hand just lightly fluttering its wings.
There is no way off the track. It is over a steep gorge.

You have built you dream house on this railway track.
Monks climb up and down its wall boards each evening.
They fly their kites out your windows at daybreak.
Their feet are the sounds of heartbeats on your soul.
You are expecting some sort of life-changing surprise
and have learned to fold origami cranes from napkins.
You idly hope they can hoist the weights that you require.

— Jared Smith

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