The Marietta Street Railroad Yards

Lyrics

June, 1899.
Ninety-two degrees by three in the afternoon.
The air is thick.
Creosote and coal smoke.
And hot pine, bleeding sap from an open boxcar.

Here is locomotive CSX 7321, a black iron beast sweating steam.
Here is Norfolk Southern car 48192, chained to siding C-7.
Cotton from the south, pressed into two-ton squares.
Lumber from the north, smelling of a forest that is gone.
The cotton bale hooks and hand trucks wait inside the 1892 warehouse, patient as bone.

This is the Marietta Street yard.
A machine for forgetting names.
It grinds the hours into dust and steel.
It takes the manifest, and burns the page.
Only the numbers remain.

There is John W. Johnston, born 1840, died 1915.
Superintendent. A name written in a clear hand in a company ledger.
Beneath him, the switchmen. An aggregate count on the 1890 payroll.
No names given.
Just a number.
The wooden water tower at Northside Drive watches it all.
It does not record what it sees.

This is the Marietta Street yard.
A machine for forgetting names.
It grinds the hours into dust and steel.
It takes the manifest, and burns the page.
Only the numbers remain.

But the ledger for 1907 notes a goat.
Wandered onto the tracks near the cotton compress.
For three weeks, it was fed oats from a loose-doored rail car.
Until a man came and claimed it.
A small, warm thing in the teeth of the gear.
A story without a number.

And what of Martha E. Johnston?
A single entry in a boarding-house register from 1903.
"Mrs. J.W. Johnston."
A ghost tied to a name, tied to a number.
The 2:17 freight has gone.
The rails click softly now, cooling in the late sun.
Forgetting.