The Railway Station Fire (from The Songs Of The Erinnyes, Sonnets, Odes, and Elegies by Jay Noya, Brigantium Press)

Before it reverberated as fire
It reached me as a faint gasp
A gasp that didn’t immediately concern me
But for its noxious cloying sweetness
Even then I closed my eyes to fix it in my head
To learn its origin treating it as unfamiliar
But hopeful in my optimism
Hopeful in utter lack of years and cumulative experience
Of busy eyes and ears as I listened even then
And closed my eyes to fix it
Here it was as a gasp first
Later as a spark of silver
Later even later still it reached me
As Henry shouted from the bottom of the slope
But unwilling and unable to show myself
I kept low with my face against the moist earth
Dark brown and traveled by ants
Trails and trails of ants religiously flung abroad
In unison communal fright
And the practical single idea to guide them out of misery
A misery which I then couldn’t have resolved
Into an abhorrence of the future
Soon the others joined Henry at the bottom of the slope
For the shouting and the clamoring
Come and see the fire at the station they chanted
Come and catch the fire
It’ll be over in five minutes
It’s burning
I could hear them and said in a whisper
Liars liars liars liars liars leave me alone
Liars leave me alone liars
And I kept still in my wet and dark ignominy
A dark ignorance and very comfortable too
Come out and come out they shouted
Clamored in languorous cadenzas
It had been dark but now light steadily softened
The creeping evening’s rim
The consolation left me
That such couldn’t be summer shadows
Hardly the shadow dispensed to secret away forever
Nightly doings spoiled by a foreign light-source
Along along it went along the way
Not in reverie and not in august anything
Along as a cicada’s whir
The afternoon’s sigh and then evening and dusk
And later the rest and all to succumb without appeal
Without the relaxing of laws
Not a whim these folds of night unrolled
No natural prank sinking in the corner of my eye
The procession and the dark gowns
The procession I repeated
And the bombazine
They’re saying that I’ll die alone in this place
Across the way from the railway station
At the feet of the eucalyptuses
How am I to blame for what they see
And what they shall never see?
And what am I to tell them if I see what I see?
Night and day pendulum-like in oscillation trapped
The night
And the day
And the night
And the day pendulum-like
No no this is not what the dead time is like
No no of it’s to be a twill weave
It’s because it is best suited briefly or not
It’s best suited if the eye catches against it
And inevitably the reasons follow
Back and forth lap against lap fold upon fold
Fetching up and hissing lingeringly
Fire fire fire fire fire fire fire


© J. Noya, 2006