“A train is a dragon…”

As I am standing on the platform waiting for my train to take me to the city for my appointment with hematology, a freight train speeds through the station on the opposite track. The snow, light and dry as soap flakes, swirls in eddies, rises and falls, dances back from the tracks. The cold air pushed forward by the train hits me, I lift my face from the article I am reading, close my eyes as the wind surrounds me and flutters the pages of my magazine, breathe. I taste iron, and dust, and winter. I feel the wheels clattering under my feet, rumbling deep in my chest. I think of a snippet of a poem on one of the Small Boy’s “educational DVDs”:

“A Modern Dragon,”
By Rowena Bastin Bennett
 
A train is a dragon that roars through the dark
He wriggles his tail as he sends up a spark.
He pierces the night with his one yellow eye,
And all the earth trembles when he rushes by.

Metaphors are important to me; it’s what I do. Words, however inadequate, and I do think they are inadequate to the task most of the time, are the only way to cross the rivers between us. Metaphors and similes, images and comparisons, get us closer to the heart of things; but only closer, never there. Maybe it is a fundamental lack of faith in my own talent, but how can I ever bring you onto the platform next to me, with the train rushing by, the sound changing as a container car gives way to an empty flatbed, the dancing snow, the wind in my face, the iron in my mouth, the abandoned page fluttering in my hand? What metaphor for this moment, gone now with the train? Always down the track, not halting at this station.

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