VALÉRY LARBAUDOde
Lend me your great sound, your fine smooth speed,
Slipping at night through all the lights of Europe,
O elegant train! and the heartrending music
Resounding the length of your gilt leather corridors,
While behind the laquered doors with their latches of brass,
The millionaires are asleep.
I move through your corridors humming,
With you on your race toward Vienna and Budapest,
My voice mingling with your hundred thousand voices,
O Harmonika-Zug!
For the first time I felt the sweetness of living,
In a compartment of the North-Express between Wirballen and Pskow,
Slipping through meadows where shepherds,
At the foot of tall trees in clusters, like hills,
Were dressed in sheepskins rough and gray...
(A fall morning at eight, and a lovely singer
with violet eyes, sang in the next compartment.)
And you, great squares through which I saw Siberia passing and the Samnium
heights,
Harsh unflowering Castille and the sea of Marmara under a warm rain!
Lend me, O Orient Express, Sud-Brenner-Bahn, lend me
Your miraculous mu∆ed sounds and
Your vibrant chanterelle voices;
Lend me the light free breathing
Of the high, slim locomotives, their easy
Motions, the e√ortless locomotives
Drawing four yellow cars with golden letters
Through Serbian mountain solitudes,
And, further, across Bulgaria full of roses...
Ah! these sounds and this movement
Must enter my poems and speak
My unsayable life, my life of a child
Who wants to know nothing, just
Hopes eternally for vague things.
—mary ann caws and patricia terry