Concerto No. 51

by Annie Maggard

The Cardinal train is tuning;
we hear scrapes and chunks, feel tracks
faster, swaying and sighing
like lovers would.

Listen: the power lines rise and fall as we pass.
Now a dotted staff,
lower notes on blackbirds’ wings,
scattered coal, a barbed wire clef,
then a row of aching strings, rusted, rosined.
Brakes begin to groan in continuo,
cars slow, and like a horsehair bow
are pulled across with a moan.
Hardwoods have been felled and piled
to make frets, chords
marked with clustered quiet, insulators
perched in rhyming lines like shining glass crows.

Everything beyond us is wooden,
an instrument we’ve made. A carved
body or a set of bellows; sometimes
a tunnel we enter, howling and clapping.

- end -

Founded in 1819, Centre College is ranked among the U.S. News top 50 national liberal arts colleges. Consumers Digest ranks Centre No. 1 in educational value among all U.S. liberal arts colleges. Centre alumni, known for their nation-leading loyalty in annual financial support, include two U.S. vice presidents and two Supreme Court justices. For more, visit http://www.centre.edu/web/elevatorspeech/

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