To hear A Separate Logic read by the poet, click or on the title.
All he had to know was that the rails
went one way and the highway went another
and that there was a separate logic, something
he didn’t have to understand; the lakes
anyhow kept him busy and straining to hear
the French in front of him. General Motors,
he tried to explain, destroyed the beds, but they
were only interested in the foliage. One thing
he learned about the Swiss, they ate all morning
and talked without a letup, and they liked
our lakes as much as theirs. Sometimes the rails
followed the road, or vice-versa, horses
versus horses; where he sat the sun
shone behind the trees, he caught the trunks
and most of the branches; he was at peace because
he could hate the corporations and still
adore the leaves; he learned to do that in Pittsburgh,
studying Frick then walking through the woods
and loving the hills and looking down, nothing
gave him greater pleasure, finding a marble
hoof, for example, or a sea shell, in some
remote Pennsylvania park, or in a factory
given over to profit to see a doorknob
made, as it were, in Crete, or China. He crushed
his cup in the netting as they moved over
water, “he was at sea,” he said to the Swiss
and he explained how “money talked” just as they
climbed through another woods. He was hoping
a small leaf would stick to the window, something
red, with a pear to match, a Bartlett; pears
and apples made him sleep. There was one bridge
diagonally under another, they were flying
into and through each other; there were two leaves,
one on top of the other and it was raining.
