on their bulging sides
but older blocky types
of faded wood now silenced
on a weedy siding, while I sit in the upper
section, aware of speed and efficiency
across from me two young men gaze
into a camera steadied by the über-clean
hands of the blond one, occasionally
speaking quiet German phrases
while the old man cross-aisle snorts
as he sleeps though his jaw remains firm
and never once does his mouth fall slack
to reveal a vacuity no one has to see
while I see how I’ve travelled beyond
the two paragons but haven’t yet arrived
at the one who catches his escaping breath
though I also note he’s mastered not
sliding on his seat into a heap of age
I turn away from humans close at hand
to look again at boxcars and wonder
what they were filled with, carried
and left behind: routine stuff of light
bulbs and oddments from elsewhere
tractor parts and toiletries, nothing worse
can be imagined today as our train passes
through Linz, bearing me, grateful for
considerate and sleeping companions, easy
to say now we’re going somewhere safe
travelling without earplugs
spotted cows on pasture slopes
moo where upper alpine snow
leaks into June-fed creeks constrained
in narrow rock walls, each unmoved
by burgeoning white
when evening arrives, all noises
cease here in my pension
except for one: someone’s
far-off singing, perceptible
only when other sounds
subside, its pitch insisting
my tired mind identify
and end its e-e-e at once
and failing to do so
I resort to pillow-wrapping
my head, to await any dream
wherein I escape that timbre
not unlike the one (I begin to think)
we hear just before dying: such
thoughts entangle the traveller
unwisely travelling earplug-less
and who is vexed to discover
next morning the mosquito buzz
arises from the radio at his bedside
an opera-broadcasting station
not turned completely off
as if the previous person here
had been malignly planning ahead
to effect another’s discomfort
and thus he suffers because he assumes
he can never correct creation
believing glumly the arrow
of the irreparable always aims for him
yet in the cool of the next dawn
he’s enchanted to encounter birds
new to him singing in Italian
on the occasion of visiting Auden’s grave
somehow I don’t expect sighing evergreens
or cruel April’s birds tuning up their notes
or the autobahn’s whine beyond the church’s
sweet-cream-pastry-coloured plaster walls
though I recognize the iron cross and plaque
labelling the deceased as poet and man of letters
and somehow the ivy’s dense entanglement
surprises me as do wilting winter pansies
on top of the small rectangle of the plot itself
(how can it hold such long, grand bones?)
and a two-pence copper coin lying atop moss
that says he is loved by someone from home
and those admirers from other lands (like me)
know better than to swipe this little token
even as I feel its melancholic foreignness
enter my thumb and vibrate with an eagerness
to claim the wrinkled poet as my own
yes, I know how men slide daily under earth
and what remains of them upside stays briefly
before it too leaves like wind or highway noise
while calamity clots nearby, one hamlet away
even as that woman in her red coat crosses
a green field, happy black terrier leaping up
to her hand, as a crow settles his wings on pale
winter stubble, and an old man in a crushed hat
posts a letter at a yellow box – and may a reply
come
