The midnight train departed from Hampton Court
station. He went on murmuring through the signaled
horns. Held between a light-struck hooves of the air
and shadowed carriage. And half-devoured under an
English blasting rain. "It's actually quite docile for this
time of year, darling", he said. I'd always known he
liked the soggy cold, for his eyes were stained deep
of teal-slate orbs. I snuck a glance towards the beyond
sky. An infinite dark, peppered with hurrying trees and
spray. At the sheer edge of horizon, the armored jaw of
the wind was lopping off the moon about its neck with a
fine cutlass, draining nearly the ashy gold. The torrent
swept wide its watery bone, plunging down the metal roof
then gutting through the graveled earth. A liquid violence.
Yet nothing more than a mutual universal carving. Where
the depths of chaos pillaged outside and soaring notes of
passion caressed within. And never was there a more curious
state than being caved inside an intimate skin of a lover and
that of the cleaving pulses of rain.
You climb the hard steps
up to the top,
crowding with jolly tourists
as the sun bleeds gold into
the smooth-cut rocks
like ice-veins in a bourbon glass.
A boy darts forward in a
blinding haze of shadow scissoring
through the mass,
an avalanche of impish haste with
tossing laughs and flopping hair.
Looms large as he turns past you,
yet smaller than a mite.
And wings through the air his bony
legs,
mounting still the graveled stairs.
kicking up the dry refuse,
while you pant at the edge of the
centermost step with a sharp
glut of envy.
Drained and temporary, you must
press on,
humbled in the confession you are
simply
a trivial, splay
speck in the wind.
Just through the casual lenses of
the passerby,
small things loom large.
Outside, the air is crisp with wrinkled bones,
while the violet hours
slowly discard its poorly dressed skin
over the starved body
before slinking atop the frosty ground;
when the crescent moon
slopes saffron rays upon a lone woman
in a house, gnarls of bordered evergreens.
Inside, long white drapes
sweep the brown-carpeted floor
as she sits by a squeaky window with its chipping paint
worn down from years of famished termites and rain-rot,
waiting there,
reeling in her foamed suspension
for the visiting ghost to
roll out of its pockmarked void at the chimes
of midnight bells.
Dung-smoke knits the sleeping cold a wisp of pale sweater,
slightly puckered where the skirting tears,
when it lurks beneath the gold-crocheted chair
wrought with ivory roses and cat's eye stitch
the woman stirs.
Eyes shift, nose sniffs the flowing scent, tongue darts
to taste the turning air
then she leans out,
with clawed whisper of
cold fingertips,
reaches over to stroke
the low-hanging stumps,
smooths back the sloppy curls of its silvered mane
grasps the unfurled hands
and sways against the caressed notes of
a carved out mandolin.
Lana Bella has a diverse work of poetry and flash fiction anthologized, published and forthcoming with more than eighty journals, including Aurorean Poetry, Chiron Review, Contrary Magazine, elsewhere, Poetry Quarterly, and Featured Artist with Quail Bell Magazine, among others. She resides in the coastal town of Nha Trang, Vietnam with her novelist husband and two frolicsome imps. facebook.com/NiaAllenPoe