Train

An English one is a drawing-room

where trees pirouette for you and the hills

click past each other like a clever Victorian toy -

disciplined, drawing attention.

 

On this train

we have parcelled out our days in raisins and biscuits,

counted soup-packets for the samovar

and the Earl Grey will last - just.

 

On this train

you can sleep through the Urals, Siberia doesn’t care -

it wants no declarations of eternal

hay-coloured distances

 

and this train provides absence

of interference. Engine business is down to a whisht.

Self  is light,

unbodied as a letter.