We sat in a train leaving Hamburg with the word
summer on our tongues. All around us people spoke
but only you understood. The world green and grey
and close through the streaked glass moved
at remarkable speeds. You read about the Middle Ages
as a mirror to understand now. I read Carver writing
about Switzerland, grief. Along the hills, blades
let the wind push through them to generate something
else. You leaned on my shoulder then turned
from me. You closed your eyes to make it all go away,
put your cheek against the window, and thought
about the things we haven’t told each other yet.
There is, after all, history and then the dark ages.
The night before still spun heavy above us. I knew
we should only miss what was ours, that I had to resist
the impulse to elegize a night like that. The red-light
district, an old friend playing drums in the beer-hot-
sweat of a bunker concert hall, grunge not knowing
it had outlived its usefulness, and bouncers
selling drugs at a lovely Thai karaoke dive bar. Eating
very late at a döner restaurant, the streets slick
with rain, you looked over your glasses and fiddled
with an old engagement ring. Our banter creates
something we can’t make alone. That’s why
I love us. So are you the wind or the windmill?
I asked. Not the point, you said. I didn’t need
to say anything then. Somehow you seemed to subdue
the space around us. You clinked our beers together,
and noted that some people look visibly German.
They can lament anything. I said, Hamburg always
looks better after a storm. The lights above flickered
off briefly before pushing the night back out the door.
You spoke of your friend Roy’s sadness about
his daughter growing up, and then morning opened
like an eye and then the train entered a tunnel
and then the world went away, but darkness is overrated.
All of us want to reckon our pasts, Carver wrote.
Yes, and sometimes we want the signs lit in multiple
languages, want the man asking for the tickets
to smile back at us, for someone like you to hold
our hands when we exit the tunnel and the cloud-grey
world returns, all blemish and rain, as we sit
looking back into the direction we just left behind.
Lindsay Wilson is an English professor in Reno, Nevada where he co-edits The Meadow. His first two collections are No Elegies and The Day Gives Us so Many Ways to Eat. His writing has appeared in Narrative, Fourth Genre, and The Colorado Review. For more information go to www.lindsaywilson.net
Additionally you can find her at www.facebook.com/waltwhitmansbeard, @unclewaltsbeard, and @lindsay-wilson.bsky.social
