Edith Pfister: Two Poems
Trains | Little Green Men

Trains

There is,
In this first house of ours,
Always the sound of trains.

I wake in the middle of the night,
To his whistling breath
And another long low whistle
Of a midnight express.

He sleeps on.

I am awake.
Naked,
I creep into the other room
To press my nose against the glass.
To feel the midnight air against my skin.

He will not wake till morning.

In the window seat he made for me
I wait, silent and still.

Listening for the next train,
For the next breeze to blow my hair back,
To rattle and shake these sturdy walls.
To make me dream.

Little Green Men

Because the world
          Is always
Slightly
       More than intellect
Can comprehend

We need possibility

God,

  —  Or little green men

         Or an equation
Perhaps.

We’d like to think
That something like us
    But greater
Is still in control

Like us
     Is comfortable
And chance and fate
         Without reason or choice
Is outside our realm
     Of possibility

And we make like us
         Almost us
And greater
      Is lesser
And we trust reason and right
      —Or our conception of them
To prevail.

Poet's Biography:

Edith Pfister was born in 1975 in Cambridge, MA, and has been writing poetry her whole life. Currently a graduate student studying biology, she lives outside of Boston with her fiance. These are her first published poems.