...of a town

The town I was born in was made by a crossing of tracks. A rare and momentous event, this intersection, for those two tracks had passed over mile after mile of prairie as if the earth they lay on were space through which they were falling - two lives, two histories, two kinds of loneliness - with no idea they were converging, and must cross; yet in the moment of their meeting, they were silent, for what did they compose then but an illiterate's X? So my town did not have the shape of a string stretched briefly beside a track as so many did, in imitation of their makers; it was little and round, swelling slowly in the arms of its X, filling out a pie already cut in four pieces; and the portion with the trees was served with economic ceremony to the rich. The town called itself Grand - not Grand Crossing or Grand Junction, not Grand Union or Grand Meeting or Grand Chance - simply Grand, and the grand trees there, also an accident, shaded the roofs of the mighty. The citizens put in a few, of course, and over the years some grew respectably large, but mostly the wind blew, and the sun fell - molten - to run in the streets. One lived all summer through the burning of Pompeii, and during the dust bowl years that substance billowed like ash through the town, sliding beside fences in loose coils, streaming along walls, and drifting onto porches, into stables, exposed shops.

Night. Joked no one. Sat silent at the dinner table, forking

in rage, not pie or potatoes; the children marshalled round me;

Carl's lip swelling where I'd struck him; my wife, for a change,

like a smiling Buddha. Wrong. 'Tis below you. 'Tis bad habit.

No more of it.

Atoms, motion and the void, Democritus has written, are the three imperishable things.

[The Tunnel, Gass, W. H.]