XIV – Bouillon

No train has stopped here since the ’50s, but it remains
in all the ways that count my stop. It still says Gare
above the arch, the guichet’s glass has stayed unbroken,

the tracks are gone but there’s a kind of stitching
in the ground, parallel scars where grass shrinks
back from growing. Then, kerbside vertigo:

that two-foot drop from platform-edge into
the next arrival, its endlessly suspended service,
and a few (never so aptly named as here, now)

railway sleepers, hold all I’ve ever known, in miniature,
of the world’s speed and its solidity, a delirium of lost footing
followed by the knowledge that there was nowhere further

I could fall. This is still the quartier de la gare,
where the rain comes down like credits on an old film,
a roll-call of lost professions: slate-cutter, gamekeeper,

sommelier, market-gardener, butcher’s boy, seamstress,
blacksmith, breeder of rabbits and dole queue flâneur…
the last being my grandfather, tempering each day to a fine point

on the soft anvil of his idleness. Artisan du temps libre
he called himself, artisan of the empty hours:
filling his days of worklessness in the Café de la Gare,

then hollowing out his nights in the Hotel de la Gare;
he never made his mark on anything
and yet I see him everywhere.

4

  

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