Dark Falls by Railway Lines/
The Murderer’s Motif
How the
souls cry out their battered endings
from
this shallow dumping ground,
here
where the train gasps going by,
the
abandoned rooms licking their cracked sour paint.
The
sandy track glimpsed looking up
from the
page or lap top,
the
endearing favourite song fluttering in scrubby messmate,
my
decorative sentinels shedding skins.
So
carefully placed and tended now,
a
travelling case, glove, sweater, leaky shoe,
the pair
left at home in mistake,
the two
dollar umbrella bought especially.
Cured
now of all sentient need,
this is
how I haunt those lost in waiting,
with the
feinted shadow that old mail left unopened
offers
the respite of a returnee’s call.
I shimmy
down the greasy pole of hope
into the
baking sweaty wakeful nights,
the fire
blanket of visitation suffocates any promise
that no
news tantalises the kindling of a chance.
And into
this terrarium of ordinary come exotic
is
strained the pattern of vicarious makings,
for a
scaffold of all the generous donations,
to craft
the collection of what cannot be named.
My heart
out of tune from this riff raff life,
sometimes
sirens pass by other streets,
the
arias of justice play to the audience of the comfortable.
Loaded
up, all the mementos burned out of the vanity of possession,
leave
only traces of material anonymity.
Gathered
from their singularities my vacancies are filled,
one big
breath on the overpass,
the
express rushes to me.
- James Walton 2016
James Walton lives in the Strzelecki Mountains in South
Gippsland, Australia. He has been published in The Age and Sydney Morning
Herald newspapers, and many journals and anthologies. He has been short listed
twice for the ACU national Literature Prize, is a double prize winner in the
MPU International Poetry Prize, and Specially Commended in The Welsh Poetry
Competition. His collection ‘The
Leviathan’s Apprentice’ is available. He’s been a Librarian, bred Salers
cattle, and was a public sector union official for many years.
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