Orpheus Hops A Freight Poem by Leonard Kress

Ninety miles- it takes from dawn to dusk,
but I am in no hurry. Dangling my feet
over the boxcar's edge, sprawled in grit
and grime, my father, that great solar disk,
hitches behind, coupled to the final car,
rolling along the sedge of Lake Michigan shore.
Like him I have all day, and several more.
Those poets I stood among yesterday are

all dead- Ginsberg, Rexroth, Duncan, and Oppen.
I shout their songs over the roar of this rolling line
and shred them- to cars at flashing gates, to children,
chasing death along the tracks and trestles.
Hear these words, I say, but prepare for mine!
braking toward the night in which Chicago nestles.