Under the lamp of childhood, the atlas of the world
is open to the man: his fingers travel
continents, stroke the blue seas,
cross their blood red lines
to America — to that inevitable page, with circles
where his father had set down his whisky glass
on the Nebraska plain, with pencilled names
of strangers and train times:
the whole damn Western in which the hero flees,
reduced to its director’s scribbled notes
of a young man on a train, hurrying to some future
from an unforgiving past.
