Panorama

That sure's a mighty big train
Rollin' through a mighty big country
And we all warm and cozy,
smarphonéd and beKindled
Sit, or lay, and look
At endless fields, white or grey
- nary a mountain
"Nay, nary a hill," she says
not even a dimple, a tiny bellybutton
this ladyland's ample bosom
is flat as a vestal virgin's, and paler.

There are houses, small and large
all with large, peaked gables,
all drowned in snow, all brown.
We wonder whence the brown comes,
the woods are all so greyly grey
grey and silver and greenless grey.
Mighty big woods, too. We've been
going through them for days and
days and days and
days.

Sometimes we wonder if it has an end
At night, under the pale tablet-glare
looking at an endless black square
(a painting a million miles infinite)
we wonder, like kids before a fire.
Of course it ends, our adult mind
chides us like a movie governess.
But the light small and fire-like, so
the acrid samovar-smoke in our nose,
We wonder through infinity.

A big train, solid, bursting with reality
and yet what magic in names, in
the commonest and stolidlest names.
Through an ice storm we sped, born
by magnets and lightning, out of
dainty Irkut, daughter of Baikal,
and into the Apple Mountains, into
the country of the Black Lake, the
Black Dragon River.

A solid, fifteeen-mega-watt-loco
train. Four and thirty wagons,
passages online-buyable.
Sixty-eight stewardesses,
souvenirs available.
A big lump of reality
sliding us through myth.