OVER us stands the broad electric face
With semaphores that flick into the gaps,
Notching the time on sixtieths of space,
Springing the traveler through the folded traps
Downstairs with luggage anywhere to go
While others happily toil upward too;
Well-dressed or stricken, banished or restored,
Hundreds step down and thousands get aboard.
In neat confusion, tickets in our brain,
We press the hard plush to our backs and sigh;
The brakeman thumbs his watch; the children strain
The windows to their smeary sight-Goodbye—
The great car creaks, the stone wall turns away
And lights flear past like fishes undersea;
Heads rolling heavily and all as one
With languid screams we charge into the sun.
Now through the maelstrom of the town we ride
Clicking with speed like skates on solid ice;
Streets drop and buildings silently collide,
Rails spread apart, converge, and neatly splice.
Through gasping blanks of air we pound and ford
Bulking our courage forward like a road,
Climbing the world on long dead-level stairs
With catwalk stilts and trestles hung by hairs.
Out where the oaks on wide turn-tables grow
And constellation hamlets gyre and glow,
The straight-up bridges dive and from below
The river’s sweet eccentric borders flow;
Into the culverts sliced like lands of meat,
Armies of cornstalks on their ragged feet,
And upward-outward toward the blue-back hill
Where clouds of thunder graze and drink their fil.
And always at our side, swifter than we,
The racing rabbits of the wire lope,
And in their blood the words at liberty
Outspeed themselves; but on our rail we grope,
Drinking from one white trolley overhead
Hot drinks of action and hell’s fiery feed.
Lightly the finger-shaped antennae feel
And lightly cheer the madness of our wheel.
We turn, we turn, thrumming the harp of sounds
And all is pleasure’s move, motion of joy;
Now we imagine that we go like hounds
And now like sleds and now like many a toy
Coming alive on Christmas day to crawl
Between the great world of the floor and wall,
But on the peak of speed we flag and fall
Fixed on the air we do not move at all.
Arrived at space we settle in our car
And stare like souls admitted to the sky;
Nothing at length is close at hand or far;
All feats of image vanish from the eye;
Upon our brow is set the bursting star;
Upon the void the wheel and axle-bar;
The planetary fragments broken lie;
Distance is dead and light can only die.
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