Commuter Digressing
by Davide Trame

Train window, quite a frame:
another year starts
in the ashes of bloom,
the sea of cornstalks,
withered now, bronze filaments,
a burnt crowd in the low sunlight,
or burnt gold, rustling in memory,
the stream of the past in its lush rust.
The train sails, I am stuck to the mast.

Stuck to this frame.
The grey heron by the lakes,
sheets of wings in their own sky
filling a whole glance
like a distended cry.
And the buzzard, I have taken in today
the very hook of his beak
while he was perched on his throne-
same pole in the vineyard-
I have taken in on his wings
the map of a forest in shades of brown,
I have pictured a crown,
these birds must have always been kings.

I am stuck to the frame of this reign,
as to my journey.
Now the train has stopped at the midway station
and I am waiting in my bit of eternity.
Stuck. To just this frame. Until we move.
Then what?
My fingers are drumming by the train window:
it’s all around us the beyond,
when it likes it’s good
at piercing our heart,
like any moment that can always
be the last.

On verges like this
we are prickled by a shower of sparks,
being infinitely much more than anyone knows
what passes between heaven and earth;
so we, stuck to the frame,
having “nor youth nor age”
in swarming cells, pass.

And say it’s because of destiny, genes,
why not dreams,
each of us struts and frets stuck
on a flash of its own.

Now we move. My fingers drum by the train window
until the station is gone.

______

Davide Trame is an Italian teacher of English, born and living in Venice. He has been writing poems exclusively in English since 1993 and they have been published in around 400 literary magazines since 1999, including Poetry New Zealand, New Contrast (South Africa), Nimrod (US), Orbis (UK) and Prague Literary Review. He published a poetry e-book collection with Gatto Publishing in 2006.