Classic Poem

We’ve both seen the postcard in museum gift shops,
two trains wreathed in smoke, dark figures
swirling between, almost smoke themselves,
the roof resting on nothing but air.
Behind the trains you see three more carbarns—foreshortened,
gothic—and a tall building as weightless as the sky.
And the sky, blue-grey like the steam floating above the trains.
Everything volatile, gaseous, about to evanesce.
When I think of the train station
in Madrid, not the Atocha, but the smaller one
to the north, this is what I see, hopelessly
romanticized and out of date. All the pain
of leaving you made pretty and whole.
Everything in flight, even me. Even you.