“Here or Somewhere Else, or, The Grain Silo” by Sharon Kunde

in memory of Alex Pacas (19) and Wyatt Whitebread (14), who died in a grain silo owned by Consolidated Grain and Barge in Mount Carroll, Illinois, on July 28, 2010

The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else.

—Robert Frost, “The Wood-Pile”

The Southwest Chief begins its run. High in our berths
we slide through solsticed Illinois on snowscab-moated tracks.
The ones who raised me lie behind, alongside factory fields,
in rust-rough opiate towns; the ones I’m raising here, two boys,
as clean as new-peeled corn. The worn-out fields decline beneath
a petro-shroud that’s nitro-spiked, twinkled with zinc and phosphate:
stubbled gold as sharp as knives and itched with grit. A half mile off,
a clump of neon signs sprouts like purgatory sun-
flowers, ubiquitous yellow M; red-white-and-blue
escutcheons hawking brands of gasoline. Though I’m not lost
(no Frost, I know exactly where I am: these tracks lead to
the Golden West), I track junked cars, enough to pave the earth,
stacked slabs of cracked cement, violet mounds of clinkers, heaps of tires.
A pile of frost-furred railroad ties reclines
behind a cinder-block bar called Ziggy’s, succumbing
to mushroom and lichen. Coven of Mephistos, fat black
tankers of crude gloat at the Faustian bargain they’ve wrought—
their biggest yet. Deranged Stonehenge, three silos stand,
meteorites jammed in clay, gone dark. Some few years back,
a nearby town lost two teen boys inside such bins.
Eight thousand tons of corn, the ruined prairie’s load,
flowed out to a conveyor belt; one boy jumped in
to loosen sticky clumps along the wall. What was it like
to walk on that grain river, to feel the golden squelch,
the close rich breath of such abundant fuel? To feel the ankle
tug and swirl, to slide inside consumption’s smoldering guts?
The second boy dove in to dig him free. He was engulfed.
Consolidated Grain and Barge denied all liability.
We lumber through a crossing; red-eyed, orange-striped gate falls closed.
As day gives up, the barnyard lights grow bright and sinister,
as clear as song. Back home, at LAX, a thousand thousand
planes lift off above the sea, a thousand million sweat
and burn on roads. We writhe inside a silo high as Icarus.
The sky is cracked. The sun’s too much. The ankle swirl and tug.
Train picks up speed. We fly past roads that spoke to some other
nowhere, dead-end sign the hue of winter corn. The dark that’s coming.