Poetry Tuesday

Slow Freight, by Karen Fiser
(from her collection Words Like Fate and Pain)

Swelling bone my boxcars
jolt down the steep track
of night. They click and sway
around the long deep curve
of the thirsty hours, then far
across pale rumpled sheets
of desert and slowly up into the aching
mountains, silvered face of rock
slanting away to the empty lairs
of animals who spend their nights
outside awake. The dry stars observe
from their freezing distances.