Although You Mention Venice Keeping It On Your Tongue Like A Fruit Pit And I Say Yes, Perhaps Bucharest,

Although you mention Venice keeping it on your tongue like a fruit pit and I say yes, perhaps Bucharest, neither of us really knows. There is only this train slipping through pastures of snow, a sleigh reaching down to touch its buried runners. We meet on the shaking platform, the wind’s broken teeth sinking into us. You unwrap your dark bread and share with me the coffee sloshing into your gloves. Telegraph posts chop the winter fields into white blocks, in each window the crude painting of a small farm. We listen to mothers scolding children in English as if we do not understand a word of it– sit still, sit still. There are few clues as to where we are: the baled wheat scattered everywhere like missing coffins. The distant yellow kitchen lights wiped with oil. Everywhere the black dipping wires stretching messages from one side of a country to the other. The men who stand on every border waving to us. Wiping ovals of breath from the windows in order to see ourselves, you touch the glass tenderly wherever it holds my face. Days later, you are showing me photographs of a woman and children smiling from the windows of your wallet. Each time the train slows, a man with our faces in the gold buttons of his coat passes through the cars muttering the name of a city. Each time we lose people. Each time I find you again between the cars, holding out a scrap of bread for me, something hot to drink, until there are no more cities and you pull me toward you, sliding your hands into my coat, telling me your name over and over, hurrying your mouth into mine. We have, each of us, nothing. We will give it to each other.

For the Stranger  Carolyn Forché