Frederick Pollack
Winter Station
This crowd is unlucky: its
status – waiting on a platform,
snow falling, for a train, inevitably late –
seems old-world, while
the sensibility – belligerent,
expecting (for no reason) better,
oriented more
towards cars – is modern.
Moreover, someone intolerable
though still apparently official owns
the PA. Besides providing
news of the storm and the train’s
minute progress, he remarks on
that progress. On crowds for whom trains
never came, or for whom those that did
brought death; and
how small a relative advantage
may be before it’s discounted.
If you’re there, never once losing
hold of whatever hand, you
face at each moment
a choice. To imagine
the warm and gleaming city, swept of snow,
to which the train will deliver you.
And because that joy, that
inhabitable toy
is the promised end, you can
admire, see freshly, each
fraying coat around you,
each breath-cloud, each vector of
snow in the light. Or you can
take, from the tremulousness
you hold, instruction:
no train will save you;
stasis is journey.