Beyond Delay

Now you wake up at the train’s umpteenth extra-stop,
you have been nodding off, your stare drunk
in the bare, still patches of countryside
and the constant rails’ shine where eyes drop.
You wake up at the shuffling of steps
and see passengers leave, first lingering
on the railway tracks then in groups walking away
across the hedge, in the field, walking, becoming dots.
And you are alone in your dream.
Spellbound in tiredness, lazy, lost. Sitting on your seat.
Why bother to ask, look for someone?
You know, the world has gone, you won’t find a soul.
You know it by the sound of the air, the breeze
eyeing you sideways with a gaze you hear and hear only,
thrumming on treetops, rustling, like wings on wires,
like eyelids.
You sit, doze, know you have time to let go,
an ocean of soil and drifting grains and fingers
of unaccountable glass blades,
the carriage sinking slowly day after day,
the rails into the stones and dirt and nettles,
the yellowing corn by the hedge in tall rows,
the blue sunny carpet of cicadas glittering, grinding,
covering the carriage among dandelions and sunflowers
and brambles like arms and hands advancing through the windows,
and bees buzzing, filling your neat body’s silence,
crowding skin, bones, irises
like the snow in its hush
copiously falling on McCabe after he stumbled
and fell on the slope and couldn’t but sit
and by sitting he froze
while Mrs. Miller in the opium house lying down on one side
was smoking, drifting in her own endless clouds,
meeting and forgetting the ever opening sky,
the swallowing horizon.

~ Davide Trame

Davide Trame is an Italian teacher of English who has been writing exclusively in English since 1993. His collection”Re-emerging” is available as an email book from www.gattopublishing.com. Davide lives in Venice, Italy.

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