Ten Poems by Alexandra Teague
Transcontinental
10 Poems
“In a railroad to the Pacific we have a great national work, transcending, in its magnitude, and in its results, anything yet attempted by man.”
- American Railroad journal
“Gunpowder and Chinamen were the only weapons… builders had with which to fight the earth and stone through which they had to pass, laid in their path centuries ago by the Creator.”
- Engineer for the Transcontinental Railroad
I. Crazy Judah (1859)
They said he might as well build a railroad
to the moon, his maps laid out like lakes
in the desert. What is needed is a proper survey.
His maps laid out like a whorehouse Bible.
Who would touch it? Who believed a man
who made a mountain range a molehill,
who tunneled and gun-powdered granite
fact to lay his tracks out of the ruck of things?
Who promised tightrope-narrow ridges
holding trains–not years from now, but
now. What’s needed are the men and money, not just plans. Who charted routes across
the Long Ravine and Donner Pass where
fear split open: black oak in a lightning
storm, where rivers spilled like thought
too fast to follow. His wife said, You’re giving
away your thunder. He said, This country is
a house divided. Who would join it? With
what hammers and stakes could men cross
a continent he had to sail around to say,
There is another way. It is a well-known maxim:
The gods wait for a beginning before they lend their aid.
II. The Big Four (1862)
Because they were men of vision,
which meant men of money, believers
in the Northern route to the new free West,
believers in the pocket-creased maps of surveyors, the bare-armed muscles
of strangers, the sledgehammer strikes,
the new flanged rails, the country healed
in its iron lung–they invested funds to sail from the Eastern seaboard and
around Cape Horn: shiploads of crowbars,
hammers, dump carts, rails, switches,
spikes, tents, hitches, plows, drills, everything but camels (the Confederate
plan to cross the Southern desert):
the country an infinite snake: mouth
gaping around the future’s iron tail.
III. The Workers (1866)
The records admit no record of the hands
and fingers lost in the blasting: the grand and every day explosions of granite into light,
the times they tried to hide in time but couldn’t (something in the way: a horse,
loose rubble, exhaustion). Or the loss from sledgehammers. Eighteen pounds rising,
striking, rising. The first heat of day slicing cold muscles–that swinging til only opium
could hold them still for sleep- the pig-iron snow-plow pushing even then through
dreams–splitting continents, families, youth into heaps beside it, or the train steaming off
its tracks through their bones: their coughs like nails in tamarack trusses, their ribs
full of gunpowder, as outside the iron ribbon, as history would call it, shone. As if
all they were doing was stitching along the country’s seam: shimmery, simple,
whatever fingers they had, safe in thimbles.
IV. The Sierras ( 1867)
Already dead of yellow fever years before,
Judah never saw two thousand men from China
work for weeks inside those long white tents
of snow: the tunnels they lived inside, ate inside, blasted, and tunneled further, the walls
they hard-packed against gravity, the dank smoke-
haze and fear of falling sky in which they learned
to move like snow itself: a stiff suspension, particulate, a joined numbness. Only the steam
of tea, a bit of corn meal. Talk of eating
the horses. Silence for days after the avalanche,
a weighted quiet like every white key on a piano played at once, then never played.
The survivors working faster now: black powder,
rails, reed-thatched baskets, in which, when spring
came, they would dangle over chasms–afraid of the air now–blinking in the rain-bleached light:
the river below gleaming like another railroad
built while they burrowed: all rushing wheels–
what the dead, when they thawed, would ride.
V. Sherman’s Peace Council with the Indians (1867)
We
built
iron
roads
and
you
cannot
stop
the
locomotive
any
more
than
you
can
stop
the
sun
or
moon.
VI. Ferguson’s Diary (1868)
And then we passed through a dismal
and desolate country: a terrible country:
all sagebrush and grease weed and the mules
out of their depth in the river, swiftly
carried by currents: the awful look of terror and despair as two men went down. My level
tangled in the wagon box, so I had to drop
it or be dragged under. I never found it
or the guns or men we’d lost. No matter the death toll, the engineers are concerned
with the bridge and making some money. Some Indians made a dash on some pilgrims
at sunrise. Later we were attacked by Indians
and succeeded in shooting one. Four men
were killed and scalped. I have no sympathy for the red devils. May their dwelling places
and habitations be destroyed. May the greedy
crows hover over their silent corpses. Two men were shot this evening
in a drunken row. Another man and four
mules drowned. A man was wounded, another
killed: occasioned by some personal difficulty. The carelessness and reckless disregard
for life and limb, the promiscuous shooting
is perfectly outrageous and alarming.
Still, the bridge is a success.
The first passenger train crossed
the ridge at noon. The time is coming
and fast, too, when
there will be no West.
VII. Hell-on-Wheels (1868)
Hell, one foreman said, must have been raked
to furnish them: these men and women who rolled from field to field: the buildings slap-
dash built: canvas and shanties: the Germania House with its whiskey and 50 cent meals, its hurdy-gurdy
dancing: skirts hiked up to God-Knows: and the rail crews’ hungers sledgehammer heavy:
lanterns and legs and the hip bones of strangers: a few slung-down hours: something stronger
than iron: Benton, Laramie, Bear River City, Corrine: which is fast becoming civilized-several men
having been killed there already: the alkali dust ankle-deep and shifty as gunpowder: the men
white as roaches in a barrel of flour: the women powdered sweet over filth: the one bookstore
(in one photograph) maybe a joke: a den of antiquity: the broken spines, loose pages
caught in these crosswinds like the cottonwood where Dugan–hands cuffed by vigilantes–
had begged to leave the country, and he did, when the rope pulled taut, and the wagon drove
away: the corpse of Damocles dangling over scrub weed: the trains unloading
their own future rails: a bitch birthing whelps in the dust: bones under bourbon floorboards:
it was monstrous, wondrous, hideous inside those tents and buildings: transitory as soap bubbles:
everything rainbows and scum.
VIII. Jack Morrow and Friends (1868)
-After the photograph by Arundel Hull
After Hull climbs his camera down from the windmill-half-built,
rickety as light on this dust-storm morning–
after he climbs down from a boxcar–the station sleeping
in the drunk dawn–the barrels of gunpowder Morrow stole
from his own wagon trains emptied (for later sale), then filled with sand
to sell to strangers: this moment: Morrow seated on a barrel, long legs
draped over the hoop, pinstriped, casual, palms against thighs,
his elbows jutted out to show he knows his body’s value: twice the space
of other men’s. His posse–even the man in front–a backdrop: creased-up
brims and crumpled suits and watch fobs shining in this flat light
that is not about shining but staring straight like the man who chose
not to steal this camera when he robbed Hull’s stage. Who can
perform at will the miracle of gunpowder into sand into money
into (short-counted) ties to sell the railroad. Who lights his cigars
from burning bank notes while the workers wait.
IX. Roving Delia Fish Dance (1869)
This telegrammed challenge from Hopkins to Huntington
which meant, decoded: We’re laying track at a rate of 4 miles
every day. The U.P. pioneers with their shovels at dawn
aligning the night-laid ties as more men moved behind:
pairs with tongs to lift the rails, position them, drop
them. Position them, drop them. The foreman calling
Down! The fields tamped and graded for their iron crop
U.P. to C.P., C.P. to U.P.–that must outrace its own growing.
The trains caught in snowstorms. Stalling. The papers
calling the Union Pacific an elongated human slaughterhouse.
The foreman calling out Down! The papers asking Where
and when will they ever be joined? ROVING DELIA FISH
DANCE. We are working as fast as is human- headlong
as slick fish. We are dancing with sledgehammers, tongs.
X. The Golden Spike, Promontory, Utah (May 10, 1869)
Even then–noise, confusion,
crowding. The reporters
couldn’t see. History says
Hewes (a baron of sand dunes)
presented it. 13 ounces approximate
gold. No sledge marks to show
if it was struck at all–if Stanford
missed, as they say. No marks
from removal. Laurel and gold.
As if the railroad had always been
a simple shining. What’s needed
are the men and money. A simple
striking, like luck in a pan.
What’s needed is a proper survey.
The country laid out like a map
of its future: a whorehouse Bible,
a house united. Judah’s
widow (by coincidence,
their anniversary) not invited.
I refused myself to everyone that day.
Those two trains waiting to inch
nose to nose: The No. 119,
The Jupiter. Smash of champagne
(or wine) against the cattle catchers,
strike of blows (or silence
of the silver maul’s misses).
Thar spike bristling like an oak
in lightning. The live wires flashing
that one bright signal
coast-unto-coast. It is done. (Not years from now, but now.)
Cannon fire in Salt Lake City,
D.C., San Francisco. That spike:
a single rail to the sun.
