Randall Jarrell

The Orient Express

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.