The long hour goes
Like a slow train running.
Another sky’s static weather
Dips leaden behind the trees,
Hangs ragged pannus
Where rain may yet fall.
And the slow train
Endlessly becoming
Blurs the immediate landscape.
The arriving hour remains,
A pinhead in the future,
So minutely exact,
So irrelevantly indistinct.
Three horizons:
Lined with cloud,
Lined with trees;
A town with traffic;
Thrusting green fields;
Holes in the deep brown earth;
Water, for a moment still,
Whisked into a pallid sunset.
Forest and emerging leaf,
Black sheep and a graveyard,
Treeless tree tubes by the waterworks,
And so the landscape stutters.
Slowed to a station stop,
Time, so tabled, obeys the master,
His voice embodied in a sign
Speaks the way ahead.
Tomorrow, like destinations cannot come.
The long hour slants
Like a slow sun
Over wet plough-marks.
The furrowed moment
Edges us past a bridge,
An empty field or celandine paddock.
Another graveyard-mounted skyline
Reminds the travelling mortal
Of something true.
The sound of bridges
Passes in seconds.
Traveller misses traveller
By design
In the architecture of roads.
Long train running:
Train running long.
Villages of infinite sameness
Slide over the green world
And rivers, rocky, rushing,
Slow slipping, sky-coloured rivers,
Bring another stop.
The click of points,
Even the single eternal rail,
Echoes yesterday’s clickety-clack,
The chaingang railway music
The diesel-driving boogie.
Today the drummer in the railway car
Has no cigar, neither fat nor thin.
His rhythm is persistent
And the sky follows the beat
Like a heart forgetting.
The journey becomes us:
No longer travelling.
Even in our gross momentum
We are here already.
Trains slow or long
Find a place of stillness
Where entire countries pass
While the eye blinks
And the heart murmurs
Or skips a beat.
This is illusion:
A construct of travel
Of motion.
Speed appears irrelevant
But brings the voyager
Hideously massive
To a no longer expected
Destination.
The long train slows,
Creeps into god’s platform
And throws its dreaming inmates
Upon the mercy of the guard.
The long train,
The glory train,
The one-way ticket,
The meet-your-maker,
Hopeful traveller,
While the going is good
The good get going.
This train
Ain’t got no gamblers,
This train,
Last train to Glasgow Central
Be-de-be-de-bare-bum
To Glasgow Central.
© BH 2009
These days we never look up from our smart phones. The world goes on without us but we think we're in it. In a Facbook post, my friend Carol reminded me about looking out train windows. I remembered this: a landscape poem made during a journey to Glasgow. From the image I get, it's Perth southwards. It's good to look.
NOTE: I'd like to mention two references that crept in here. One is Vernon Dalhart's Runaway Train (the 'drummer' referred to there is a travelling salesman); the other is Billy Connolly's Last Train to Glasgow Central, including the be-de-be-de-bare-bum) and that was itself a take on Lonnie Donegan's Last Train to San Fernando.
NOTE: I'd like to mention two references that crept in here. One is Vernon Dalhart's Runaway Train (the 'drummer' referred to there is a travelling salesman); the other is Billy Connolly's Last Train to Glasgow Central, including the be-de-be-de-bare-bum) and that was itself a take on Lonnie Donegan's Last Train to San Fernando.
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