Overnight while I slept the train carrying me vanished

into the mountain tunnels and I rocked through 

the smoke-filled air, safe but wishing for delivery 

among the exits—that is, safe as I’d wished you’d seen me

leaving one life for another in a brilliant performance

of gold boxes tricked along a railway to California. 

It was for the experience not outcome even if the man

in the metal snack closet ran out of cheese pizza

halfway through and you probably now thought of me

as a kind of annoying bird who flew suddenly 

at your head and then fled into a pine forest and, I know,

it’s wrong of me to think I can anticipate your thoughts:

after all, this story was written on a laminate table 

in the Observation Car while the lakes shimmered

into sandbanks of dry evergreens and the night bled

into a ...