Southwest Chief

 

In a moving pencil box

Close the curtain and the sliding door

We shrink to fit

   into our tiny home

 

It’s jagged and lurchy -

squealing, groaning, banging

     Impossible to walk without

boomeranging

               down the hallways

   A toddler is steering his toy locomotive

     and the wheels have jumped the track

 

But grandma also rocked us side to side

We babies dozed, without a care

Someone else is driving now, so

I can take my eyes off the road

 

Scenery unscrolling before us

square red adobe homes

      in Albuquerque

A clock that doesn’t care if it’s 3 or 10 or 7:22

There is no other sense

   than barns blurred by speed

      and skittering grain silos

 

Yet what great fear and panic

   led up to this

What outrage, what fury

Afraid of change, fear of moving

frightful of choosing –

 

The view is a sponge that absorbs

 the last fiery trickles of anxiety

  Powders the baby’s butt

      and wraps the package in clean blue tissue paper

 

Last night, my guy and I

in the same bunk, sparkly dark

Looking out the window at a few stabs of light

Kissed, and this felt new

 

Kansas City brick buildings

  pointy-roof houses in a row,

    smokestacks

The difference from the usual

   palm trees and freeways

    is beguiling

 

Iowa, snow on ground

red barns and horses,

greenhouses

Illinois farmland, naked trees

Flat as a griddle

 

On a 7-minute stop in Missouri

If you pick up snow off the ground,

they instantly know you’re from L.A.

 

Safe, sleepy, contented

til I am gobsmacked

by what is revealed

through the rectangular eye

 

Speeding away from what I was.

I am on a train.