The Maiden Lady Who Threw Herself at a Train in Sanborn, Iowa



There are no burning marks where
her hands grabbed the railroad tracks
No haunted smile hovers above the eerie grass
in a nearby pasture

After the train had passed, after
the whistle’s crazy scream, the ditches grew demons
for thistles, and she
is merely a clotted pool
a glistening stain
tomorrow
a weak reflection

the blooming poppies
the tiger lilies
making ferocious summer love
under the hottest sun in the wildest
field

The moon will dance a wan dance tonight
in her unsweetened blood
and the townspeople glad with gossip will shake
their heads rattle her last rare words
discover hidden virtues at last in a bottom drawer

Death by a dumb locomotive,
DEATH BY A DUMB LOCOMOTIVE the morning headlines read
and stars fall down to worship the saddest death in years
and in heaven angels kiss her broken soul
and the gods repair her dangling bones
oh and her fisheye stare is diamond
oh and her sour gray hair is gold
                                    Cynthia Nibbelink

Every small town had its “maiden ladies,” “old maids” we kids called them when we were growing up, like the leftovers at the bottom of the popcorn bowl.  Cynthia Nibbelink, Iowa woman, Dordt grad, calls the central character of this poem a “maiden lady” and thereby invests her with a bit of status that the townspeople, “glad with gossip” at her death, clearly did not give her.  To them her death is simply something to brighten up their boring lives with a few days’ gossip, a bit of “tsk, tsking,” an occasion to find something good to say about her in her death that they never said during her life.

Nibbelink invests the suicide with a hint of eerie mystery but not much:  “the ditches grew demons,” she writes.  But they are really just thistles. You might expect to see more indications of supernatural forces in the presence of such an extraordinary occurrence, but “There are no burning marks where her hands grabbed the railroad tracks/No haunted smile hovers above the eerie grass.”  Malign spirits should be hovering over the scene of such an extraordinary event, but they are not evident. 

Meanwhile, ironically, the tiger lilies and poppies in the ditch where her blood glistens are making “ferocious summer love,” unaware of her death.  But the maiden lady’s blood was “unsweetened by love”; she had known neither married love nor sexual ecstasy.  Even the ordinary neighbor-love to which Jesus calls us seems to have passed her by.

Oh, but then, in the magical last lines, everything changes.  The townspeople may have been indifferent to her in her life, but now she is in the presence of the stars and the angels and the gods.  They kiss her and bow to her, love her and transform her.  They restore her broken soul and her dangling bones, they make her beautiful: 
“oh and her fisheye stare is diamond
oh and her sour gray hair is gold.” 

These lines, especially the repeated “oh’s” at the beginning of the lines, say everything that needs to be said about her transformation.


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