And you as one of those perhaps appear to me,
Impromptu pieces that I rehearse again
With sad darts of wit and wanton apology.
Suddenly I feel I am in pain.
You go, I wake, Catullus stretches, everything
Vanishes backwards, love and suffering.
TERMINAL CONVERSAnON
Born to return to every strange new place,
Seeing, as the Buddha says, that you only live once,
I found myself in a great railway station
After midnight. That was late enough for me,
Though anyone who was everyone was there:
Blank terminus or furnished house? For, strange to say,
The waiting room had all the charms of home.
It was winter, the last train had gone.
You will recognize the
mise en scene
Familiar from too many foreign movies.
Those beside me showed no signs of caring,
And it was plain they thought of going nowhere
At that hour of the night or, already, morning.
They settled down, resident aliens,
To what they appeared to accept as the human condition,
To sleep and not to read, or to discussion
Of the trivia of their uprooted lives
In a language that, although it was not mine,
I found at once that I could understand.
What they were saying in that foreign tongue:
