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Ronald Frank

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Returning

The first train from The Priory
Took just three of us, all sombre
From a night aboard the ferry-boat’s
Angles of unwelcome.

The motor trembled, hesitant,
And that Sunday train then moved
Into an elsewhere, an unawakened land
Of far, sallow lights. The pulsed
Clatter of the train’s wheels
Was intrusive in the blanket still.
We launched oft, rolling
From each Toytown station
As though still at sea, by
Empty car-parks fluttered
With scrapped plastic, while
Indifferent platforms counted
Out the line, through the sleep
Of Kent, the headcode declaring
Its way to the future.

                  Now a pale glimmer
Corrupted night’s density and
A blue hint caught first a barn here,
There a cow or two, by Sandling,
Westonhanger, Headcorn,
Staplehurst, Pluckley
And on through Paddock Wood,
The puckered face of fenced suburbs,

Changing at Tonbridge onto
A side line of Leigh-Penshurst-
Edenbridge.

                         South Godstone
And the air-brakes sighed me
Out of a torpor and out to the forecourt’s
Crunched ballast and there stood:
You and the car. In my age now,
I still see you there.

Then home to be harboured for
A seamless day of murmured words,
Untidy and untimed with each other, rumpled.

Somewhere within my body
That day remains and we live believing
Only such things are true. The rest is fluff,
There are no other wonders.

 

Ronald Frank cultivates his garden in Surrey and is a compulsive traveller to remote places, hunting small plants on large mountains.

Page(s) 62

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