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