Sestina – Rattling

The brush of the train
Against the sleek snow
Rattles my pen
And also my thoughts

The day lurches forward
And the clouds fold in,
The sky blackens and crisps

The light of the dining car
Beckons, with salty peanuts and square blocks of ice
Summer becomes night,
And the white fairy dust is sprinkled
Liberally, throughout the crevices of the hills,
And the crevices of my mind
Rattle and open
With the movement of the train.

And the day lurches by
As the box-y train spans mountains, and centuries
And crosses tunnels, and continents
Now a different plane of existence altogether,
The fairy dust turns to acid desert
Where the heat burns the soul
And the crevices of the mind, dry without water.

Still the sleek steel train lurches on
As the day rattles by
And my pen shakes with little earthquakes,
Crossing the t’s of my poetry
But the smells of continents and space
Drift by, wafting through the dining car
Of the gravelly train

And my gravelly mind, with its damp crevices
Drifts back home
With the movement of the fierce train
Returns to the fairy dust
Now slushy and gray – an imperfection on the canvas
That is my continents

Still the train, and my pen, lurch on,
Between day and night