The station pigeon in his grey coat and his human half-rhyme
the station tramp are dressed identically: one patrols the guano-
lacquered buttresses, the other eyes the pigeon-proof netting
like a grounded acrobat hating the safety net that broke his fall.
Our longest scheduled stop. All the lines meet here,
and pass through: at Ostende wet sand clogs the hourglass;
in Bertrix the talk is of suicide, slate and rain,
where the track is ballasted with broken rooftiles
and a fog rises off the tepid, unemphatic hills.
The next start: a tug at the engine end, the carriages aligned,
setting like broken bones as the Porte de Namur,
a café on the edge of town you failed to notice coming in,
now appears as an after-image etched in light
against the glass, then against your eyelid
as you try to blink it off: Namur opening as it sweeps
from view – quayside, citadel, river-coloured sky
all widening like a dynamited gorge as you head into
la wallonnie profonde, deepest Wallonia,
and if you ask how a country that takes an hour
and a half to cross can have such a thing as depth
the rain against the window will remind you
how six inches of water is enough to drown in.
Liquidation totale. The train pulls out to a rumble
of dislodgement, the grince of wheels – resistance
turning to momentum – then a small silence long enough
to frame, as completely as the black rubber frames
the wall of cloud against the glass, the clack of a pétanque
ball followed at a distance by its clipped gravel splash.