Expansive Poetry & Music Online Contemporary Reprint

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Robert Darling

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Robert Darling is a professor of English at Keuka College. He has published poems and reviews widely in the United States, Canada, Australia and Great Britain. Winner of numerous awards for his work, Darling is also the author of a Twain series book on Australia poet A.D. Hope. Robert lives in western New York with the permission of his two cats, who also allow him to occasionally smoke a pipe, but not during dinner.

The Woman on the Train

copyright (c) 1997 by Robert Darling



A hint of beauty in a face
lined with investitures of pain
so human it seems out of place
in the blank faces of this train

just leaving Jersey City for
New York and disillusionment.
She doesn't notice my rude stare-- 
she has been lost to time, intent

on other faces so far away
this train becomes unreal to her.
I'm off with friends to the ballet
and she for something else, I'm sure.

She is so gnarled she seems a serf
exiled from Russian novels, a vision
from other worlds wrapped in a scarf
and shabby clothes. Did golden icons

or men take the kisses of her youth?
She may have been attractive once.
But now I'm dreaming too--the truth
might be prosaic as the Bronx.

The train jerks back; we disembark
into our own particulars
whose total is the sum New York
heaves toward a blinded night of stars.

As the ballerina pirouettes
and tests the body's gravities
until the mind almost forgets
the tortures of deceptive ease

I think of her hunched form again.
I see her younger, in a field
at harvest time in a Ukraine
I've never seen. And now I've failed

to note what's here, I've missed most of
this grand illusion I've come to see.
What's it about? Most likely love.
Its grace is alien to me.

The ballerina condescends    
to earth at last. We rise and go.
I listen to the talk of friends    
who praise the poise, the practiced toe

that learned its art: to bear the weight
of gravities, past and to come.
The spirit bore the body's freight
and found its equilibrium

while I, who cannot dance, dreamed of
that bent old woman in our car
with pity for us both, with love
for all that makes us more than what we are.

                       Robert Darling

Don't miss Robert Darling's fine chapbook, Boundaries, available from Somers Rocks Press, c/o Arthur Mortensen, 505 Court Street, #4N, Brooklyn, NY 11231, available for $5 plus $2.00 S&H and any appropriate taxes (NY 8.25% or $.41)