Out of Metropolis

We’re headed for empty-headedness,

the featureless amnesias of Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada,

states rich only in vowel sounds and alliteration.

We’re taking the train so we can see into the heart

of the heart of America framed in the windows’ cool

oblongs of light. We want cottages, farmhouses

with peaked roofs leashed by wood smoke to the clouds;

we want the golden broth of sunlight ladled over

ponds and meadows. We’ve never seen a meadow.

Now, we want to wade into one—up to our chins in the grassy

welter—the long reach of our vision grabbing up great

handfuls and armloads of scenery at the clouds’

white sale, at the bargain basement giveaway

of clods and scat and cow pies. We want to feel half

of America to the left of us and half to the right, ourselves

like a spine dividing the book in two, ourselves holding

the whole great story together.

Then, suddenly, the train pulls into the station,

and the scenery begins to creep forward—the ramshackle shapes

of Main Street, a Chevy dozing at a ribbon of curb, and here is a hound

and a trolley, the street lights on their long stems, here is the little park

and the park stuff: bum on a bench, deciduous trees, a woman upholstered

in a red dress, the bus out of town sunk to its chromium bumper in shadows.

The noise of a train gathers momentum and disappears into the distance,

and there is a name strolling across the landscape in the crisply voluminous

script of the title page, as though it were a signature on the contract, as though

it were the author of this story.

Copyright Credit: Lynn Emanuel, “Out of Metropolis” from Then, Suddenly . . . Copyright © 1999 by Lynn Emanuel. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, www.upress.pitt.edu. Used with the permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.

Source: Then Suddenly— (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999)