White lights,
A morning train from Valdemoro --
Why have they turned them on?
Nothing like darkness
to soothe the fog,
the vision that climbs the hills
of each stranger's face
and attempts escape through a window.
The car is now
a compartment of eyes:
Pinto, San Cristobal,
Atocha.
Clear, wet ribbons
cut down by the sky.
A vein-work of yellow fields on the glass,
growing.
The harder it rains,
the more you learn about distance.
On either side two men
are speaking Russian.
----------------------------------
Here is Lorca's "After a Walk," from which I've taken a line.
After a Walk
Cut down by the sky.
Between shapes moving toward the serpent
and crystal-craving shapes
I'll let my hair grow.
With the amputated tree that doesn't sing
and the child with the blank face of an egg.
With the little animals whose skulls are cracked
and the water, dressed in rags but with dry feet.
With all the bone-tired, deaf-and-dumb things
and a butterfly drowned in the inkwell.
Bumping into my own face, different each day.
Cut down by the sky!
1 comment:
this poem is such a beautiful study- not necessarily of sadness, the first feeling it conjures up, but of the type of isolation that's felt when you talk to yourself.
i love the narrative and the interruption of the narrative, especially the question in the 3rd line which pauses the thought and puts what the eye sees on hold.
it's great that "the car is now/a compartment of eyes" evokes both a paranoid sort of claustrophobia (a discomfort at what the light reveals and exposes) as well as the image of strangers all staring from the windows at what is passing. even more than the excellent lines in the 8th stanza ("the harder it rains...") this one seems the fulcrum of the poem.
from the beam of white lights at the start to the vertical motion of rain, how it maps its curve onto the glass of the window, i can feel a driving, transversed alone-ness. well done
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