Live Encounters Poetry & Writing May 2026
The Champagne Special, poems by John Philip Drury.
The Champagne Special
trains, fine wines, and each other. They lounged on a flatcar fitted with a
line of benches, the shadows of the engine’s smoke fluttering on hillside
pastures. The train swaggered on the swaying uncertainty of trestles,
passing a way freight halted on a siding. Whistles hooted and moaned
at each crossing.
picnic, popping corks, pouring champagne from chilled magnums, offering
toasts, and feasting on squab. At Delta, the crew pushed hard on cracked
wooden beams that moved a turntable, spinning the steam locomotive
for its return trip.
syncopating the click and clatter of wheels over tracks. On tangents,
they played fast, vamping out Dixieland across the Mason-Dixon line.
When tight curves or steep grades strained the antique engine, the
band slowed down like a Bourbon Street funeral—the sad joy of horns,
blowing sweet licks to fuel the dance of everything that comes to nothing, a
cargo of empty flutes, bones on platters.
Bridge Crew
Everyone else is overjoyed when the sun comes out after two weeks of
rain, but I say “Hell’s bells” as we get our orders to run a work train to
the maintenance-of-way yard, two spurs in a weedy field.
Once there, we lift and load new mud sills, scaring away a fox from the
pile of ties, Jimmy aiming an imaginary ten-gauge as the smoke blows
from Number 26.
The engine stops before a curving trestle and we clamber down the
rocks and muddy paths. Blue sky above, but a wet mess in the valley
when we set up camp beside a telephone pole.
Loads waggle down on ropes. Through biting sunlight, we steady them
against the muddy flood plain. It’s bad with wooden sills and stone
abutments—the way wood settles, knocking sills out of true.
I give the wooden board an extra kick with a boot that’s like a pound
cake, frosted with mud. “Get down to business, sun,” I say, “Start shoveling.
Make your firebox burn like hell.”
The Brakeman’s Dream
For once, the mail train ran on time and switches seemed to throw
themselves. The locomotive sped up stiff grades and slid through cuts
in a hillside, taking tight curves like a bobsled. None of the passengers
complained of jolts and jostling. The train moved silently: no screams
of babies jarred by stops and starts, no whine of flanges grinding on the
rails, no chuffing from the engine, no whistle blowing at crossings, no
bell ringing. We glided past each depot, pulled by motive power that put
the crew to sleep and drifted over trestles that had collapsed, slowly
descending until we skimmed the tassels of corn, leaving a wake behind
the coach. That’s what I saw when I woke up and clutched the brake
wheel, turning and turning but stopping nothing, afraid that if I halted,
the train would finally crash and all the sounds that had been hushed
would burst. But there was no explosion. I turned the wheel, and fields
darkened, our lanterns flickered, white flags signaled that we were arriving,
on time, for once, at the terminal.
© John Philip Drury
John Philip Drury is the author of six poetry collections: The Stray Ghost (a chapbook-length sequence), The Disappearing Town, Burning the Aspern Papers, The Refugee Camp, Sea Level Rising, and most recently The Teller’s Cage (Able Muse Press, 2024). His first book of narrative nonfiction, Bobby and Carolyn: A Memoir of My Two Mothers, was published by Finishing Line Press in August 2024. After teaching at the University of Cincinnati for 37 years, he is now an emeritus professor and lives with his wife, fellow poet LaWanda Walters, in a hundred-year-old house on the edge of a wooded ravine.