The Adirondack

Jolting and jogging and shunting and stop.

Crawling and tilting and sprinting and stop.

The gilded-age rails are fixing to rot

And to judge by the rolling, so is the stock.

The train whistles progress, but the points are all shot:

Two hours at the border, and stop, stop, stop, stop.

Lake Champlain glistens for hundreds of miles,

To the West Adirondacks; to the east just a mire.

There is beauty here of Arcadian kind,

But the route is industrial, brutal, and wild.

A river, a bridge, a ubiquitous flag.

Eleven hours of sidings, and freight trains and drag.

We yawn through New York, creeping or stalled

In a chariot of steel, obesity withal.

Past Plattsburgh, Westport, Fort Edward-Glen Falls.

Through Schenectady, Hudson, Poughkeepsie we trawl.

A river, a bridge, a vertiginous sight.

We pull into Penn and escape with the night.