West to Nowhere by BR Schoenbein

I discover myself trudging westward to nowhere, on this warm spring morning, when my droopy eyes half-open in a dark dream, wandering aimlessly, along a long-forgotten path, devoured by time and obscured by last fall's leaves.

Dark-clustered hickory and walnut trees twist and bend over shaping a funeral shroud, menacing me with its forbidding boughs swaying back and forth laying siege to this serpentine trail.

This lonely hiddness of nowhere snakes past the sleepy village of Lewistown through the foggy river bottoms of the ancient Spoon River Valley, where a primal people once hunted wild buffalo and turkey and who now appear standing silently as solitary sentinels in fields of corn swaying in the howling west-winds.

Distant echoes of melancholic train whistles and clanking steel wheels sail across the seas of meadows and green fields dancing to the music of a long ago past when this old abandoned track was once the Chicago and Rock Island Railway carrying eager passengers from Peoria to the wild expanses of Colorado and Montana.

Out of my dream, sleek iron-dark locomotives streak across the valley thundering past long vanished villages where Lincoln and Douglas once spoke of a House divided, where the ghosts of Jefferson and Jackson still haunt this neighborhood of abandoned farmhouses and broken-down barns now occupied by screech owls and swallows.

The despondent dirge of a mourning dove fills me with vague longing as my heart weeps un-expectantly for all my yesterdays once pregnant with promise now giving painful birth to the crushing consequences of unforgiven sin.

My ghostly outline becomes a vanishing cloud, a fleeting shadow envious of the light diminishing as the garish sun rises higher and higher in the bleach-blue Illinois sky.

Bound tightly, by the vagaries of life and obscure origins, I track in a trance westward to Quincy, ever seeking, but never quite reaching that hazy horizon where the sky meets an elusive anywhere, somewhere on this plodding passage to nowhere.

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