The Orient Express in  General   

One looks from the train
Almost as one looked as a child. In the sunlight
What I see still seems to me plain,
I am safe; but at evening
As the lands darken, a questioning
Precariousness comes over everything.
Once after a day of rain
I lay longing to be cold; after a while
I was cold again, and hunched shivering
Under the quilt's many colors, gray
With the dull ending of the winter day,
Outside me there were a few shapes
Of chairs and tables, things from a primer;
Outside the window
There were the chairs and tables of the world ...
I saw that the world
That had seemed to me the plain
Gray mask of all that was strange
Behind it -- of all that was -- was all.
But it is beyond belief.
One thinks, "Behind everything
An unforced joy, an unwilling
Sadness (a willing sadness, a forced joy)
Moves changelessly"; one looks from the train
And there is something, the same thing
Behind everything: all these little villages,
A passing woman, a field of grain,
The man who says good-bye to his wife --
A path through a wood all full of lives, and the train
Passing, after all unchangeable
And not now ever to stop, like a heart --
It is like any other work of art,
It is and never can be changed.
Behind everything there is always
The unknown unwanted life.

By Randall Jarrell

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Other poems by Randall Jarrell:

• 90 North
• A Country Life
• A Sick Child
• Children Selecting Books In A Library
• Gunner
• Hope
• Losses
• Mail Call
• The Black Swan
• The Breath Of Night
• The Death Of The Ball Turret Gunner
• The Elementary Scene
• The House In The Woods
• The Olive Garden
• The Orient Express
• The Player Piano
• The Refugees
• The Woman At The Washington Zoo
• Well Water