Something I've Meant To Write About For 30 Years — By Elizabeth Bishop

The Florida East Coast Railroad: dawn

One felt dirty, dirty, with swollen feet
and twisted clothes twisted under one
the scratchy sooty plush
the reek of beer and rye; a sailor's hat
hung on a seat arm. All the sailors were
passed out or sleeping & the soldiers, too—
in a mad ugly mess open mouths
and baby faces, flushed

We stopped for just a moment, a small town
in Southern Georgia? probably—
we jerked, backward and forward there
and I woke up—
Looking right into nigger town
then back, then the same place again,
as if to make sure I'd really seen it
I'd really see it, and I did—
The light was lavender. The unpainted houses
were almost the color of the air
air color, almost—sodden (this was the South)
bare muddy yards, black trees all its black people were in bed
one porch with a wisteria
as if the air had started to crystallize there
and melted again, dripped down—
But then it was a fence, a fence
that took my eye—I saw it slide back silently
then forward like a slide several times
a picket fence
Where the wisteria was (the picket fence
once whitewashed)
someone had fixed
with nails, half hammered in, then bent,
a piece of broken mirror to each picket top
gothic shape—
these fragments
catching the light, reflecting, white
and bluish, sadly, over and over again
as we shunted
only the mirrors seeing the morning coming
20 or 30 of them—I lost count 20 or more
a crazy iconography decoration why not decorate morning?
Irregular jagged jagg'd disconnected mad