1.
At its height, the station hummed: seventeen passenger trains daily. Now it’s a dispensary. Cannabis in the ticket booth, brownies baking in the basement. Preservationists call this adaptive reuse.
When E. A. lived there, Gardiner made paper: manila, newsprint, onionskin for Bibles. Sodden pulp, steaming rollers. Mill men spooling the ceaseless sheets.
E. A. was called to a poet’s work. Few in Gardiner would have called that a job.
The poet left in 1897. The station stopped service in 1960. The last mill closed in 2001. Everyone in Gardiner called it inevitable.
2.
At 29, E. A. took the train to New York and stayed. But in his poems, he returns and returns to a village he called Tilbury. Its residents falter against change. Against their own failings.
Like Miniver Cheevy, who sighed for what was not. He called it fate and kept on drinking.
In Tilbury Town, the people endure or they don’t. You can empathize or not. E. A. isn’t kind. He isn’t unkind, either.
3.
Driving into Gardiner, a sign welcomes you to Tilbury Town. The sign’s one-sided, so when you leave it says nothing.
Those mills along the Cobbossee are gone: some demolished, some burned. The rail lines, though, still run through the sites. Still hold close to the river.
Built of brick and raw granite, the station echoes the design of Romanesque structures. Medieval castles and churches. Sheltering places. Architects, those optimists, call this revival.
4.
Gardiner once had its own brass band. E. A.’s house had a grove of plum trees. His mother, Mary, tended them until she died of diphtheria.
My mother grieved when I told her I was leaving. We grieved in parallel, then I was gone. And what if I’d known about those shifted cells—quietly colonizing even then. If I’d known what I called home would be lost to me twice.
5.
The brass band could be called upon to lead funeral processions. Mary’s red plums ripened in her absence.
6.
E. A. wrote about unremarkable people—the first poet, scholars say, concerned with the ordinary. Though he denied that Tilbury was modeled on his hometown. Or only, he amended, in a shadowy way.
After E. A. died of cancer in Manhattan, someone brought his ashes to Gardiner, likely by train.
The coupled cars steady-swaying. Wheels repeating against the rails.
The conductor calling out the name of each station, each village. So you always knew where you were. How far you were from home.
From Certain Shelter (June Road Press, 2024) by Abbie Kiefer. Copyright © 2024 by Abbie Kiefer. Used with the permission of the publisher.