Isolated Moments From a Vacation in Europe

Isolated Moments from a Vacation in Europe

I bought a ticket for London on the last day of the year.
You kept reaching for my arm in Paris, the comfort of being known,
Touch not impeded by invisible signs and missteps,
But romance is not a stolen thing.

Remember this, in your hotel room alone,
A stranger in the city and a pouch of tobacco your only friend;
Remember the silence of a dinner alone,
The revolving of your thoughts,
The listing of your heart.

On the train to the airport there is sometimes a man and his son.
He plays the violin, the boy collects the coins.
They move through the cars like characters in a story,
Like an old tree beside a highway,
Like a tilting barn in the fields blurring by on your way somewhere else,
Like regret.
While you are in the airport waiting room, the violinist puts his son to bed
In a red brick house.

Suddenly the beautiful unlikely, a woman with raven hair
Delicate as silk, wrapped up to her neck in black wool, holding a book up
Reading while she walks,
Not even looking up to leave the train, to walk down the platform oblivious.
She is the moon, rising over the hill in autumn;
She brushes your face as she passes.

On the roof outside the window of a tiny room,
A sunny spot in a prison courtyard of graffiti and ducts
Robot fingers reaching up to the only freedom,
A forgotten old world alien skyline,
Laundry flapping from the power lines.

Back on the train a woman does not have the right ticket and receives a fine.
She is poor. She keeps saying Pardon! Demande Pardon!
I think about how to say I’ll pay in French
But the moment passes, shaking its head.

All this life and none of the secrets, but letters and prayers
To dribble out like breadcrumbs for moonlight to discover
A white road to heaven,
A way home in the dark.