Classic and Contemporary Poetry
TRAIN WINDOW, by ROBERT FINCH First Line: The dark green truck on the cement platform Last Line: Box-cars beyond, while our train waits here. Subject(s): Ice; Railroads; Railways; Trains | ||||||||
The dark green truck on the cement platform is explicit as a paradigm. Its wheels are four black cast-iron starfish. Its body, a massive tray of planking, ends in two close-set dark green uprights crossed with three straight cross-pieces, one looped with a white spiral of hose. The truck holds eleven cakes of ice, each cake a different size and shape. Some look as though a weight had hit them. One, solid glass, has a core of sugar. They lean a transitory Icehenge, in a moor of imitation snow from the hatchet's bright wet-sided steel. Five galvanized pails, mottled, as if of stiffened frosted caracul, three with crescent lids and elbowed spouts, loom in the ice, their half-hoop handles linking that frozen elocution to the running chalk-talk of powder-red box-cars beyond, while our train waits here. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE RAILWAY by ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON WHAT WE DID TO WHAT WE WERE by PHILIP LEVINE BURYING GROUND BY THE TIES by ARCHIBALD MACLEISH WAY-STATION by ARCHIBALD MACLEISH TWILIGHT TRAIN by EILEEN MYLES |
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