The Purple Martini Glass Is A Brave Idea

M. rode the bullet train, Paris to Dijon—countryside smeared harder every year.

Cows turn to jetting birds. “How speed switches out recognition!” marvelled M.

Animals that made us stop and stare, and hope and worry, long gone;

what we worshipped killed off back when we were only walking, running.

“This thing obliterates entire valleys,” thought M.,

before returning to his magazine article on stemware.

Only an inconsequential voice, sound of the extinct, would say it:

Mon Dieu! He speeds straight to reading product advertisements,

poems long gone from the gray veldt in a commuter’s hands!