Rail Yard Estuary

At the edge of the city, the old rail yard drinks rain. Switch tracks gleam like fish bones under foxglove. A heron lands where freight once argued with midnight, and fog folds itself through the rusted gantries.

Cattails rehearse their soft percussion in puddled wind, oil stains loosen into galaxies of blue and bronze. Somewhere beneath the reeds, a signal lamp sleeps red, a last coal ember refusing to explain itself.

Morning commuters pass behind the chain-link fence, earbuds bright as kingfishers in a gray stream. They do not hear the frogs tuning their wet violins inside the mouths of overturned steel drums.

By August, milkweed lifts green flags through broken ballast. Monarchs stitch the air where timetables once ruled. Even the silence has tracks, curving toward water, carrying a slow train made entirely of light.