Signal Yard in Summer

At dawn the old train yard warms like a kettle, rails sweating silver into the weeds. Sparrows lift rust flakes as if they were confetti, and every bolt remembers a hand.

Between sleepers, fennel and milkweed argue in green tongues, oil rainbows tremble in puddles like spilled saints. A fox slips through graffiti-lit doorways, carrying night in its tail like a wick.

I sit on a brake drum, eating an orange, its bright rind opening the air. Freight cars, blind with ivy, lean toward each other as though exchanging rumors of oceans.

By noon the yard is a small republic of returning things: metal to dust, dust to root, root to wing. Somewhere a signal lamp blinks once, then goes dark, and still the grasses translate everything into wind.