The conductor’s whistle,
an answering squeal as the train’s wheels
jolt, a quickening hiss
as milling, infernal crowds in the cavernous
Hauptbahnhof fall away to the dull sheens
of Frankfurt, the gray-green Main,
the cindery, static, mizzling slate
of a German sky…
Being American
is part of my baggage. Even before I greet
cabinmates with a botched
phrasebook sentence and sit, my tonsured scalp,
baby-pink GI face, draw stares or nods
of boreal politeness. I hunker,
arms locked, a deaf-mute, into my cushion.
Like a film screen,
fleeting scenery
at my shoulder offers bittersweet refuge out of
and into heaviness:
miniature, pastel, red-tile-roofed cottages,
bikers on beech lanes, pastures neat
as quilts under a skyline
of blue hills, like Tennessee’s, flash by.
What a poor guesser
the mind is!
Where is the Germany of the daydream? dirndled
villagefolk dancing
in the half-timbered Marktplatz? horn-echoing
woodlands of Wagner, Goethe?—the generous
country of the tinted postcard
that somehow (oh, inevitable appetite
which makes the dissatisfied
put dreamage
to the proof!) enlisted a fleecy adolescent
indolence to board northeast-
erly-gusting winds and report for duty where
the Neckar feeds the Rhine? Today
I must confront
impermeable bedrock. The conductor, grunting,
punches my ticket.
