You complained about the impossible distance of walking the railroad tracks, but still we walked. We would breathe the dark heat, go with the soft night heat and let it cling to the bottle of moonshine between us, watery and kaleidoscopic, let it drain the color quick from our faces- lips tight to the bottle, watercolor breath. Feeling silver and large-hearted I would watch you flip quarters flat across your knuckles, my heart skipping beats like a small white pebble, leaping over the impossible brown water of the lake you grew up on, the water you washed your face with, scrubbed clean your clothes in. I imagined the way your father walked, the way he called you inside at night, gin lighting up in his hand clear as water, offering you sips so you too could feel its slow burn, that dull heat. I could only place your father in those hot- tempered moments of your childhood. In the dark you said he had a heart like cicadas, humming secrets, heart as the quiet bugs that skimmed the water, heart as the angry hunter. Looking up, the stars seemed impossibly mute in their geometry. I imagined Orion as your father, stepping down, walking clumsily, pieced together and pitch drunk off the blackness of the night, his face swimming before me, his eyes large, those soft brown lakes facing North eternally, those thick inches of summer mud kept hot under our small feet, stuck between our toes forever. I could see his walk in yours, in your slight limp, in your slow hunch, your own heart slippery as the summer. Your hands shook and it was impossible to silence your own nervous habit of flipping the quarter, sky black as water and your own brown eyes blinked, cloudy, fearing the depth of that water above us. (He did not teach you to swim.) I picked up the quarter that had fallen face up in the grass from your hands, the rail before me straight and eternal, impossible to distinguish from the moon and its cold sliced horizontal heat. The train rumbled in the distance all iron bellied, all oil hearted, thumping and guzzling coal with its smoothly grilled face, and I placed the quarter, small and silver on those tracks. We paced and walked in circles, waiting. At twelve forty three the train barreled by - smooth as water, smooth as our own slow history, pistons grinding secrets out hard-hearted- silver whirring speaking to the whites of our bones, our pale faces eating that mechanical wind, that tar scent sticking to our clothes. The night heat, that smooth black engine heat held us tight- it was boundless and impossible. (We walked home after the hot rumble of the train disappeared leaving only the watery moon and the smashed face of George Washington, two impossible and silver-hearted lovers.)