Pablo Neruda
Translated by Clayton Eshleman

Train Dream

In the station the trains were dreaming,
defenseless, without locomotives, asleep.

Hesitantly I entered at dawn:
I went about searching for secrets,
things lost in the carriages, in the stale odor of the journey.
Between the departed bodies
I felt how alone I was in the stationary train.

The air was dense, a block of disheartened
conversations, of fugitive languor.
Lost souls on trains like keys
without locks, fallen under the seats.

Women passengers from the south laden
with bouquets and chickens,
maybe they were murdered,
maybe they returned and wept,
maybe they consumed the carriages
with the fire of their carnations,
maybe I am traveling alongside them,
maybe the steam of the journeys,
the wet rails. maybe everything is alive
in the motionless train
and I a sleeping passenger
unfortunately alert.

I was seated and the train was moving
inside my body, annihilating my frontiers,
suddenly it was the train of my childhood,
the smoke of daybreak,
happy and bitter summer.

They were other trains which were fleeing,
cars crammed with sorrow
as if packed with asphalt,
thus did the motionless train press on
during a morning that was increasingly
painful around my bones.

I was alone in the lonesome train,
but not only was I alone,
many solitudes had congregated there
hoping to travel like the poor on the platforms.
And I, in the train, like lifeless smoke,
with so many ungraspable beings,
overwhelmed by so many deaths,
felt myself lost on a journey in which
nothing was moving but my weary heart.

"Sueños de trenes," Estravagario, 1958