Metroliner

In a blue-black storm of speed the train left the station. In a few throbs of tunnel-blackness the windows, frightened into blinking, saw fresh landscapes. Monstrous islands like dinosaurs rose out of swamps bent into feathery waves by wind. Skyscrapers melted down like candles. Telegraph poles were snatched away from us by wires. Incommunicado, we fled like magicians faster than sound. In step with lightnings, we sliced through mountains, we opened our hearts to valleys of mystery, gamboling like lambs of foam on waterfalls, giving a final hurrah with a geyser. Outside the cities and the mountains, into the prairie with a low minor seventh cry, we overtook the night and took the new moon in tow, with all the mica-flaked sky. Margarita Walker Dulac