Nightlights strobe through the window’s
condensation, signals from anywhere, a stratosphere,
at 3 or 4 am—sometime to find oneself suddenly
awake, making haste across a country
that will forever contain others’ breadth
of residential moonshadow. Or an owl’s. The train’s
motion is all; sleep the only known border
when travelling through such space. Then slowing to a halt,
somewhere as gripping as grease, wheels seizing the rails,
as if a reason to continue on into the long night
is duly being mustered, a wearisome matter.
Sleep, then. The resumed rhythm of the train under the stars
is a drug big pharma can’t ever market.
Horizontal, on a bunk, the idea of levitation
gets close to how abandoned by gravity
the body, an addict, feels—where?—between
a distant foreign point of departure and a vaguely
understood destination. The train ticket admits
one traveller to erase hard distance itself,
then memory of it. If transmigration is release, a vast belief,
this surely must be like it, once, then repeatedly.
