The Orient Express

Selected Poems (1955)

One looks from the trainAlmost as one looked as a child. In the sunlightWhat I see still seems to me plain,I am safe; but at eveningAs the lands darken, a questioningPrecariousness comes over everything.Once after a day of rainI lay longing to be cold; after a whileI was cold again, and hunched shiveringUnder the quilt’s many colors, grayWith the dull ending of the winter day,Outside me there were a few shapesOf chairs and tables, things from a primer;Outside the windowThere were the chairs and tables of the world …I saw that the worldThat had seemed to me the plainGray mask of all that was strangeBehind it — of all that was — was all.But it is beyond belief.One thinks, “Behind everythingAn unforced joy, an unwillingSadness (a willing sadness, a forced joy)Moves changelessly”; one looks from the trainAnd there is something, the same thingBehind 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 trainPassing, after all unchangeableAnd 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 alwaysThe unknown unwanted life.

The Wide Prospect. Selected Poems (1955)