Today's poem is by Emily Tuszynska

Night Train
       

The interior landscape shifts, erodes.
        While the children sleep we shore it up
                with flotsam but the next day another

tide-bitten chunk of coastline
        crumbles. The trouble is we're living
                all at once. We keep rearranging the rooms

to find a way to fit. By day we push
        aside the clutter, lay the baby
                on the floor she drums with open palms

as if to feel it's there. Something solid
        underneath. Mostly everything sways.
                A tree falls and the house next door

stands empty for years. The boy holds his sister
        to the window and shows her how
                to wave goodbye, and that's the morning,

fingerprints in the dust of it. The day moves away
        in all directions. On leafless winter nights we hear
                a train we've never seen on its way to some unknown

destination. If we were on it, I'd lean my head against
        the window's rattling, icy glass, look through our reflection
                at the moon rushing through branches.

Look, there's a farmhouse, miles from the lights
        of any town. Someone turns on a lamp in a window;
                someone stands there, watching us go past.

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Copyright © 2024 Emily Tuszynska All rights reserved
from Surfacing
Grayson Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission