The Trans-Siberian Railroad (poem)

Author's note: This is one of only two poems of mine that I actually like. On long train rides through Siberia, when everyone else was asleep, I often found myself staring out the window at night and watching the little villages pass by. It's something I still think of sometimes. How I'd love to go back there and actually visit the people in those places, and see what it's like. Someday, maybe I will.

We pile the extra horse blankets

in front of the heater to stop the flow

of Russian over-compensation

and the gentle undulation

that now has lulled

my colleagues to sleep on narrow sleds

folded out of the edge

of a room unforgiving and metallic as the

clanging of the rails, gaps in them swollen

and contracted by the bitter cold that builds

unhindered.

no hills,

no towns,

no trees,

If not for the pervading darkness,

I’d see the pole. But no-

just a gloss of flaky water

many meters high, and hardened

by months of inactivity- a state

where life cannot survive under suffocating

blankets- a forever sleeping land.

Every couple of hours, a town

approaches and then passes quickly as the

flicker in the lantern of a man

who dons his fox and then his bear

to dutifully prepare to venture out,

the only time today, into the deep

to retrieve unfrozen water from the pump,

then woodenly step back

into his icy little hovel,

where no blankets go unused.