"Have trains ever collided?"
a young boy asks his mother.
I am watching them.
She pulls him towards the door of the coffeeshop by one hand. His other digs in his pocket for the answer.
It is an urgent question,
a question born immaculately
in curiousity,
a question that must be answered.
"Yes," she says, after a moment.
And then they are gone,
leaving me to write that there was a time before I knew of train crashes,
of crashes at all,
of tracks and streets criss-crossing horizons like tic-tac-toe games
destined to end.
There was a time before x's and o's
a time before letters,
were magic, their permutations endless.
but this was before i could count
before numbers existed,
before seasons and seconds.
before minutes and planets danced pirouettes on an axis of time
like angels on the head of a pin
before religion
before a need to explain
before death and birth, and day and night were divided.

Then, there was only the pulse of silence.
and it pounded like pencil on paper,
like rain on pavement,
like the heart of a train.

And two thoughts collided,
crashed in the criss-cross of nerves that carry consciousness!
and light sparked in the darkness of the inside of the universe!
and i lived in a body inside-out
my hands reached out, suddenly needing nothing and everything
the big bang at the beginning went off like a gunshot,
took hold like a wound
bleeding life in the middle of blackness.
The crash had caught fire,
and my eyes burst open
and began to see.

Labels: By Ana