The station halves the town: on one side a Funerarium
beside a shop that sells Variétés (of what?),
and on the other the old station standing at our back,
a haunting in red brick with smoke effects of brick dust.
Then the industrial-sized rose window in the apse
of the engine shed that’s tagged with graffiti and levitates
on a cushion of dry grass. Freight carriages rust
to an autumn-coloured powder, their iron fine
as gold plate, their wheels trellises for weeds to climb
in circles. One, half-way up the hill, has that shot-
while-escaping look of a boat dragged onto land
along a pair of rails that just gives up, not
suddenly, dramatically, but in increments
of disappearance like lifeboat tracks dissolving
in the surf. The telephone poles along the platform
beat out their twenty-metre intervals and each time
cut across the station name: first Je then elle,
more than twenty metres between them now, between us,
each in our neutral, barely even melancholy place.