Memory lapse

[Ten days in Edinburgh at the Jazz and Blues festival, and raw here I hand over whatever I wrote. I will publish each and every piece in a separate entry, chronologically but starting back in time, like retrieving my footsteps in the sand.]

A melancholy face, 

seen through the flitting

window of a surprising

train booming on a race

in the opposite direction,

brought to a tired mind,

years later, as a friend

breaks out the information

of an orderly quietus,

both sat on the edge

of a bed facing the ledge

of the window, like statues

ready to recover from the salt,

her face ebbing away

as the memory of that day

quietly comes to a halt,

finally acquiring a meaning

long sought and deferred,

as that the moment conferred,

duly timed to the awakening,

probably hidden all this long

in the fold of the bed-sheet,

in the cold of the slanting sleet,

or in the iridescence of the sun --

which ought to have been seen

years before on that train

thundering through sun and rain

glowing on that face's dull sheen.