Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TRAIN WINDOW, by ROBERT FINCH


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TRAIN WINDOW, by                    
First Line: The dark green truck on the cement platform
Last Line: Box-cars beyond, while our train waits here.
Subject(s): Ice; Railroads; Railways; Trains


The dark green truck on the cement platform
is explicit as a paradigm.
Its wheels are four black cast-iron starfish.
Its body, a massive tray of planking,
ends in two close-set dark green uprights
crossed with three straight cross-pieces, one
looped with a white spiral of hose.

The truck holds eleven cakes of ice,
each cake a different size and shape.
Some look as though a weight had hit them.
One, solid glass, has a core of sugar.
They lean a transitory Icehenge,
in a moor of imitation snow
from the hatchet's bright wet-sided steel.

Five galvanized pails, mottled, as if
of stiffened frosted caracul, three
with crescent lids and elbowed spouts,
loom in the ice, their half-hoop handles
linking that frozen elocution
to the running chalk-talk of powder-red
box-cars beyond, while our train waits here.





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