I.

In nineteen-ten they woke to thunderlight
at Windy Mountain. Snow sheared from its shelf,
fell like a body from a great height,
took Bailets Hotel, took the track itself,
took cars and men and mailbags in its run
and drove them through the dark into the trees.
The Spokane Express was torn apart, undone.
The sun rose on a valley filled with wrecked degrees
of iron: boilers split, pistons bent,
sandpipes cinched tight around the standing pines.
They counted ninety-six dead from the rent
of snow and steel, laid them along the lines,
and sent them down on sleds. The mountain held
the rest; the river held what bled and cooled.

II.

Two lawyers jumped from Twenty-Five and lived.
They slid the switchbacks under Cascade Tunnel,
came down end over end and rose half-given
to breathe again. Below them lay the funnel
of dark and quiet—Jesseph, Merritt, snow
packed in their cuffs. A whiskey flask went round,
the proof passed hand to hand. Yet just below,
they found Ms. Starret pinned where branches wound
her to the wreck. Her infant lay beneath
her breast, the crying gone. Another son
they cut free living, blood along his teeth,
a stick drawn from his head. The work was done
by lanternlight. The snow came down anew
and covered what the night let through.

III.

You brought me here among the dead,
among the names fixed at the rim—
a nurse, a child, a writer gone to bed.
You knew what weight I’d carry in.
The wire burns between my hands. Above,
the cliff where alder closes over ruin.
What did you want? I bring you nothing of
the relic kind—no leaf from Bhutan,
no cuspid from Siddhartha’s mouth, nor canine
splinters lifted from the rood of Calvary—
I only cede the ice-tipped thorns of Whitebark pine,
the ash of our own catastrophes
shook from the severed veil
and scattered along the Iron Goat Trail.