light is glimpsing out from its winter shell,
spreading brightness as a trapdoor falls.
It’s 5.15 pm in a snowy Tuesday
gloaming that is diligent and tender.
Trash is piled beneath empty train seats
and, outside, a river turns West to salt.
Birds and wind drop to quiet evening sun
and, on, our train plunges into a tunnel
blacker than a night has ever known
but knowing, also, light advances, grows.
A man and wife hold hands
sitting on the left side of a moving train.
They seem in love - though that kind of thing
is hard to know
because, in February, snow melts and freezes, melts
and, as we hammer North, their bodies
vibrate; little hands
and eyes connecting where the warmth is.
A flipchart, and marker pen like lipstick;
between its nib and paper – fresher air.
People sit behind a wooden desk
and talk, from plastic chairs.
Aha: the sound-bites of business;
statements, coughs, unlistening
for moments, outside, like a blackbird
expressing his magical being.
It would be good to stop this train
and lie me down on green grass
ideally near a shady river,
special, like a king and queen
maybe sleeping face-to-face
or hand-in-hand or toe-to-toe.
Changing trains seems risky. It’s winter
now and many leaves have fallen
but I do feel something-like ‘alive’ and
it would be good to jump this train
and stop momentum, all inertia,
long and narrow tracks.
Always there’ll be our story of a light
hovering moon and snowflakes alighting
around our feet. We’ll remember a new year
eclipse, a spotlighted sky and really much more
than turning a decade. Yes, let’s make
words come round to snowfalling dark
and wishing of lanterns, high, lifted in friendship
and spangled by flakes from a blackening pelt
of the whole of the sky. We’ll hope to God
to re-make the silence; transform the land,
occluding the norm. Was that a beam
when our lanterns flew high or a gleam
from a hope of the fabulous? Steady your love
and come to your senses, it’s changing above.
