Here's Maryville,
a black railroad engine
in the children's park at rest,
and the track crossing with
cotton -belt flat cars
carrying autos west from Dallas, Delaware
and Hudson gondolas filled with power stuff,
a line of boxcars far east as I can see
carrying battle goods to cross the Rockies
into the hands of rich longshoremen
loading ships on the Pacific, Oakland, Harmony,
Terminal, Lights, Blue, Illumined all night now.
Crash of couplings
and the great American train moves on carrying
its cushioned load of metal doom.
Union Pacific linked together
with your Hoosier line,
followed by passive Wabash
rolling behind.
All eerie, carrying cargo in the rear,
Central Georgia's rust -colored
truck
proclaiming the right way,
concluding the awesome poem
written by the train across northern Kansas,
land which gave right of way
to the massing of metal
meant for explosion in Indochina.
Passing through Waterville,
electric machinery
and the bus humming with prophecy,
paper signs blowing in cold wind,
mid -Sunday's afternoon silence in town,
under a frost -gray sky
that covers the horizon,
that the rest of Earth is unseen,
an outer universe invisible, unknown,
except through language,
air print, magic images,
or prophecy of the secret heart
the same in Waterville as Saigon,
one human form.
When a woman's heart bursts
in Wa terville,
a woman screams equal in Hanoi.
On to Wichita to prophesy,
Oh, frightful bard,
into the heart of the vortex,
where anxiety rings the university
with million air pressure.
Lonely, cranked telephone voices
sighing in dread.
And students,
waken, trembling in their beds
with dreams of a new truth,
warm as meat.
Little girls suspecting their elders of
murder committed by remote con trol machinery.
Boys with sexual bellies aroused,
chilled in the heart by the mailman with a letter from an aging,
white -haired general,
director of selection for
service in death war.
Oh, this black language written by machine.
Oh, hopeless fathers
and teachers in Hue.
Do you know the same woe,
too?
Turn light and enjoy effects