Poem by Daniel Hall

Untitled

            waking to another landscape
not my own, spinning and sifting
through the first few moments
of bafflement, I catch the exact
sense of a room I stayed in once,
though where it was or when—
All dwindling to nothing, a pause
in the onrushing confusion. Here, now,

this: another train, a darkness
tunneling through the dark, rocking
ticking. Across the fields
bonfires snap their flags as heaps
of stalks go up in smoky flames,
high and wild, the men who tend them
talking through the night, a dialect
I’ll never know, of a tongue

I’ll never master. The boy across
and down one berth is sleeping
so deeply he’s slightly radiant,
like a source of heat, and all I ask
is to slip back under
basking in it. New York and London,
there were moments underground:
eyes closed, set free, I found

the right speed, all directions,
friction and gravity gone
for good—. But not tonight:
we’re heading south, and the thrust’s
as clear and muscular
as the flow of cold water,
over me, through me, bearing me
into another country.

—Daniel Hall, Writer-in-Residence

Used with permission of the author.