Film Noir: Train Trip out of Metropolis

We're headed for empty-headedness
the featureless amnesias of Idaho, Montana, 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, our eyes at the clouds'
white sale, our eyes 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.

And then, suddenly, the train pulls into the station,
and the scenery begins to creep forward--a friendly but timid tribe.
The ramshackle shapes of Main, the old-fashioned cars dozing
at the ribbon of curb, the mongrel hound loping across a stretch
of unpaved road, the medals of the Lions and Chamber of Commerce
pinned on the town's chest, the street lights on their long stems,
the little park, the trolley, the faint bric-a-brac of park stuff:
bum on the bench, boy with the ball come closer and closer.

Then the pleasantly sinister swell of the soundtrack tapers
to a long wail. The noise of a train gathers momentum
and disappears into the distance leaving us stranded here,
and our names are strolling across the landscape in the crisply
voluminous script of the opening credits, as though these were
our signatures on the contract, as though we were the authors of this story.

~Lynn Emanuel