The grey and/or blue hotels
and/or trucks and/or green and/or red taxis
and/or microscopic ravens whisper
of long and/or short autumns
where everything is alphabetized
by its culpability for the lost railway.
Even your most grandiose appetite
is a disappearing locomotive.

Once these small festival boats
sailed above the trees near the river
parallel with the rails
but a hundred feet below.
It was a way of recalling
names of stations along the tracks
and of transporting the quieter passengers
who required little convenience.
Tourists sat in the dining car amphitheater
satcheled in darkness
to watch the unemployed wrestle in native costume.
We admired the ghosts of salt-shakers
The ritualistic ashtrays and napkins
The taboo of the floral Egyptian lamps.

The railroad’s rosebushes
no longer belong in the arcane category of “delights”
and we wonder if the reader will be upset
by the earnest descriptions of the Far Stations.
We take pride in the reader’s pleasure and/or pain.
All the usual narrative disjunctions pass
beyond the semi-circle of pines
beyond the sea-port town and/or toy castle windows
hidden upon this page you are reading.
You say you love a good western
and/or high sea romance
but this is neither.
Never and/or always was.

If you dream of those small festival boats
drifting beneath the tracks above the trees
in that rapport between creator and reader
then we can warn off the secret police
for one more season.
We shall miss their authority
The way they caress the corridor wolves
beneath the soft fluorescence
of disbelief and/or allegiance.

Our least intimate madness less evident than the quickest turn of carpentry
or a furtive wager on the flight of birds.
A secreted sign over those accidents speculating on departures or the return.
The old world knew.

Detective, under-secretary, resentful servant: all the same man,
and less mysterious than a train window,
even in the deepest snowfall.

Yet we own all those mornings needed to regret all those evenings,
while hasty cogitations are the most superficially beneficent
to the craft of abandonment, the unnailing art
as extravagant salaries defeat the amusements of children
turning all to a politics, and a withering salary for fun.

By wind or watch or wallow, chance betrays opportunity,
and all this in the narrow gulfs, although we have heard
she is the very finest hospital ship.
So drop in at the River Palace, and learn to crawl
along its dark deck to the tragedian’s “secret” grotto:
admiration of delusions suffice as gratuity,
and the drinks seem free, fostering
dreams of railway porters, cowboy investors, showgirls
most desired for their Oldsmobiles.
Put it all down to a cocktail of sea air and coal gas.

Toward noon, we approach a spasm of pus-yellow hills,
the small lawyer shacks halfway up the slopes.
We lift from the water toward the High Terminus,
sails and rudders and dining cars and jets vibrate together,
but the ascension falls short of aerodynamic sincerity
even as one is impressed by the exterior cling hitches
holding charm starved churches (empty), libraries (empty),
and those small aluminum fortresses (not as empty).

One more dose of distant data
and the entire pot of coffee sours. Oh well…
No easy access
to the obscurer pagoda platforms of Idaho,
and we cannot remake the bald circumferences
into a national residence for eagles.
The remaining viaducts inspire tepid conversation.
Photos of the viaducts are exchanged in the club cars.
There are red ponies seen through the windows
from the outside.
And a small clutch of worshipers
abandoning the coast
to terrapins.