I've Never Taken a Train

I've never taken a train before, except for the train
we took from the east of England north to Scotland.
That ride was blurred by jet lag and fatigue and the worry
of taking our two-year-old daughter to a foreign place.

It was the time we took her to the castle, the one we said was hers,
where the monster no one sees lives in the deep.

We have it still in photographs, sheep still
on the hillside, and in the foreground, the ruins
of the castle that my family once destroyed to keep it
from coming into the hands of the enemy English.

An explosion of gunpowder, the collapse of stone,
I imagine it as a final act of will: desperate men
gathering families, with daughters of their own,
pressing north into a land colder even than this.

There is little I remember of that train. We ate
sandwiches wrapped in cellophane from the dining car
and through giant windows, watched the sea pass on one side
and the snow-capped late-March mountains on the other.

As we passed a city on the line between these two countries,
the rock jutting out to a point, buildings like castles
and the train running right along the coast,
we promised one day to return to make it ours.

I've never been on a train before, except for that one
and the one we took returning.
But that trip is lost—to sleep, perhaps, or the haziness
that comes with age and distance and forgetting.

I say I've never been on a train before,
but one day I will take another with you
up another coast to another place
we might imagine as our own.

Our daughter is grown now and nearly gone
from us, and we from her almost,
almost to the age at which travel for her
will be to us and from us instead of with us.

I imagine us, two instead of three, in a car
of the Silver Star riding coach up an eastern coast.

We'll eat sandwiches from the dining car
look out of giant windows at the passing landscape,
foreign cities and imagine—no, promise
to visit them one day, to make them our own.