My Father on a Train in South Korea, After the War

He’s never been on this railway line before. It was rebuilt, 
after the war. He’s sixteen and with money 
he’s saved, he buys a ticket one summer and gets on
without knowing where he’s going.

He spends the next five hours looking out at the countryside, 
at the old farms and the new farms. Packs of stray dogs. 
A woman in a field crouches to gather something he can’t make out. 
The train car is nearly empty. A couple around the age of his father 
and stepmother have fallen asleep facing him 
on the wooden bench, their heads bowed but never touching, 
and he tries not to stare at the man who is missing
an arm, the way his shoulder twitches as he dreams.

It never occurred to him how slowly the train moves. 
When he gets out, it’s because he recognizes, or thinks
he recognizes the name of a town where an uncle
used to live. He looks around, sensing suddenly the distance 
he’s gone. He’s told no one what he was doing today. 
He wonders if one day he’ll go farther 
as he walks to a river that runs alongside 
the back of the station and climbs down the bank 
where he kicks off his sandals and wades in.

The train keeps going. Fish slip past him. The sun near
the horizon—his reflection and a bird’s reflection
breaking apart from his hands underwater, in slow motion.