Homework

Wish I were on a train instead:

small birches all in a row, tall and skinny with everything flat around them.

villages on a hill, the church at the highest point.

a wooden table on a lawn with misty glass bottles on it.

fences with thatches missing.

fields brown from rain-flooding.

patches of industry and back to another village on a hill, sprawling out into fields, into almost-forest.

a woman in a pink sweater is gathering twigs into a wheelbarrow.

a couple sits with a thermos watching the train pass,

and then to a middle-of-nowhere platform where old Polish women sit in long wool coats, hats, inherited earrings and sober looking shoes.

the vanishing point recedes, again and again.

a man stands, bicycle parked, by the tracks watching the trains pass as though he knew someone once who could be shuttling past

or the motion calms a wandering part in himself that he has never been strong enough to let wander.

Like the wiggling of ears, the passing trains whir his soul back into his body while his heels stay planted firmly on familiar soil.