The half-hour standstill between Poix-Saint-Hubert
and somewhere else whose name you’ve never caught
despite forty years of passing it and a little less
of thinking yourself attentive to all that passes you
is time in bas-relief, emphatic in its hollowness:
a rising tide of empty minutes draining
all the station clocks from here to Arlon,
their blank faces hung like moons above the platforms
where sheets of tabulated time contrive to be at once
exact (the 11.27 to Namur)
and untrue (it isn’t there).
Correspondances
is what they call connecting trains, even when
they don’t connect. Even when they don’t exist.
But as in Baudelaire’s poem, the page
is where they couple, that hub of all encounters,
the clearing in the forest of iron and steam.