[The Train Pauses], by Jay Bond

Train in the Snow, by Claude Monet (France) 1875

[The Train Pauses]

"All experience is an arch wherethrough / Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades / For ever and for ever when I move."
Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses"

Dragon’s tail flips out, arches to the edge to bend our gaze,
A rickety picket fence
Drawing us in to witness, from the side of
This snow-slain scene, at the perimeters of that yet untravelled world
 
Trees stand tight, arrows braced
Forking the soiled air
 
Man in black, Russian fur hat
A signal man, to keep paths apart, stop a watch
He remains turned away, a frozen moment
Pinned in that arc, an expectant gesture over white 
Like a suitor waiting
For a powdered face to lift and glimmer
Or with eyes smudging as the haze clears
 
The others, families and traders,
Arrive and leave in steady quick strokes, busy at the living fringe of
Beginnings and endings, evenings and dawnings
 
The dragon, the red-eye special, waits steaming
Smog merges with sky, sky with sullied snow,
Grayscale
 
The train transfixes, bestial head lowered,
Dazed, prognosticating
Eyes weeping weary, googling   
Headed unalterably ahead
 
The snow drips persistent, industrious, into the tracks.
The trees bristle still at the billowing fumes
A cat is sitting somewhere waiting for its meal.

Jay Bond

Australian who returned in 2020 to her city of birth, Melbourne, after a few decades teaching in Asia and the United States, now refocusing on writing. Published writer of poetry: Luna and Meanjin magazines, early 1980s; more recently Argotist Online Poetry, Fevers of the Mind Online, Poetica Review, The Ekphrastic Review and the Melbourne Poets Union Finding My Feet Anthology.