Prague to Budapest (a list poem)

 

PRAGUE STATION, 7:44am. 

Blue light. 

American neighbours.

One of their party is in first class:

“Ooh, first class,” says their friend,

after they've gone.

“I know, right,” says another.

Village houses pale against fields.

Black branches like inverted arteries of the lungs,

beside river-narrow lakes.

Fluorescent lights outside barns.

American neighbour:

“Do you have a crap laptop

to download everything on?

I’ve got every movie I’ve ever watched

on that thing.”

Ticket inspection.

Grey light.

Flat country, ploughed.

Wishing we were going slower

so I might read the village names

given on short platforms.

Factory towns, apartment blocks.

Remembering the Museum of Communism,

and the apartment projects, for workers:

build, work, dig, labour as virtue,

but writers underground.

First stop, Kolin, 8:19am.

Pink buffet cart.

Email from our host in Budapest,

who is called Attila,

from Hungary!

Pink buffet cart returns.

Pardubice, 8:41am.

 

Text from my sister Bryndis,

her New Year's dinner photos,

Reykjavik under snow, floods in Hungary,

as in Brisbane.

The web of weather reports.

Inside and outside light.

How warmth can mean such different things.

Reading Jessica Au’s

Cold Enough For Snow,

a book of nearness and distance.

How they combine when we meet family

after time apart,

memory the link between carriages,

along a line, not joined completely,

yet close to inseparable.

M’s head on the table,

a pillow of scarf and ham baguettes

that would be better off elsewhere.

O asleep, too.

F reading cricket news:

David Warner’s cap removed

from a trolley,

luggage lost.

Stately mansions with hollow windows.

Valley roads, brown hills, low clouds.

A plain town with a few, Prague-pretty streets,

the rest of the houses either alpine or Soviet, an odd mix.

I wonder, too, while reading,

why Au doesn’t name Australia specifically,

but rests it anonymously as

a memory setting, not a “here”.

The Museum of Communism insisted:

We will name the past precisely,

its language of remembering is direct, not implied.

Not veiled.

The museum cafe was closed “due to technical reasons”, the same bureaucratic language finds its way even there, where it is despised.

Broken coffee machine?

Southwards, the Austrian influence becoming more pronounced

in forehead-like eaves, thoughtful.

Villages that climb to churches.

Cotswold-like hills.

Fast flowing streams that suggest higher mountains. Steepness.

A factory called Adast.

I look it up on the free train wifi: fuel pumps manufacturer. Well, why not.

Brno, 10:18am.

The boys have started writing their own list poems that point out how lame mine is.

A walk to the restaurant carriage: double espresso and Viennese wafers.

Breclav, 10:52am.  

 

Red-capped station guard.

Vineyards.

Crossing the border into Slovakia, 11:05am.

Glimpses of the sun beneath clouds.

Kuty, 11:12am. 

Attempted snooze.

Bratislava, 11:58am.

Full train, much calling out.

A screaming toddler who has had enough. 

A sound that cuts through into the eyeballs, says O.

Parents imploring. 

The atmosphere on trains changes after every station.

More vineyards, misty hills. 

The smell of warm food on cold clothes.

News, Wayne Rooney sacked. 

Discussion, do strikers make good coaches? Dalgleish. Others? Ferguson played as a forward. Oh and Cruyff, of course. Pep.

Noon is not making a difference to the grey sky, but a band of orange remains low on the horizon, a faint promise.

Italian neighbours chatting across the aisle.

Words: chiesa, Maria, quattro, bello, mangiare, musica, sharing NY fireworks videos without headphones.

Blue train stations.

Tidy Graffiti, seemingly in permitted parts of the walls.

Remembering a young guy I once met who travelled the world to tag trains. Disliked street art, which is sanctioned. Tagging is unwelcome, the real thing, he said.

Nove Zamky, 12:55pm. 

 

M playing silent piano on my knee. Air piano?

Sturovo, 1:25pm.

First sight of the Danube, overflowing and silty. 

Hungary on the other side.

Carriage lights go off, officially enough light to count as day.

Szob, 1:36pm.

Tiled roofs. Guesthouses. 

Riverside prosperity. 

Balconies and patios for the first time.

Nagymaros-Visegrad, 1:53pm.

A few yellow houses standing out from the white and ochre of more suburban streets. 

Holiday cabins.

Someone making a reel about Budapest before even arriving playing the first bars of George Ezra's “Budapest” over and over while editing.

Recalling what Mark Twain once said: it’s easier to write about a place before you get there.

Vac, 2:06pm. 

Next stop, Budapest.

First bars still going. “My hidden treasure chest…”. Not so hidden at the moment. 

Very well announced.

Go through Felsogod

Next, Alsogod. Hmm!

“Hidden treasure chest” man has gone to the toilet, which is also, also good.

Quiet.

Budapest outskirts, 2:20pm.

Bags pulled down around us.

Squeak of puffer coats being put on.

Pink-yellow light.

BUDAPEST STATION, 2:33pm 

 

(PS the journey was clean, comfortable, modestly priced, efficient, and on time.) 

Oh Shenandoah

One of my favourite traditional folk songs is "Oh Shenandoah", set on the Missouri River in North America, and thought to originate in the early nineteenth century with traders who used the waterway. The full story it tells is an uncertain one, but Wikipedia notes the explanation that it is about a trader who fell in love with the daughter of the Oneida Iroquois chief Shenandoah (1710–1816).

The song is also an example of how stories, especially in lyrical form, can consist of glimpses and suggestions rather than a comprehensive narrative. We know everything we need to know in order to empathise with the storyteller.

Click to hear my cover of the song:

Oh Shenandoah, 

I long to hear you 

Away, you rolling river 

Oh Shenandoah, I long to hear you 

Away, I'm bound away 

Across the wide Missouri 

Oh Shenandoah, 

I love your daughter 

Away, you rolling river 

Oh Shenandoah, I love your daughter 

Away, I'm bound away 

Across the wide Missouri 

Oh Shenandoah, 

I long to see you 

Away, you rolling river 

Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you 

Away, I'm bound away 

Across the wide Missouri

Dísa's Prayer

I have written and recorded a song called "Dísa's Prayer," which imagines a moment of reflection and prayer in the life of the main character in my last book The Sorrow Stone.

Dísa's Prayer 

So these are the ways of love, 

the body is not the soul when we are gone. 

The fire inside the hull, 

now it is warm, the air is cold. 

I hold the torch, 

his last word to me. 

We were not enough 

But I am here and he is gone. 

Will he let me be with him?

Shepherding in the Westfjords

(An old poem just found.)

I came to the Westfjords to work harder, get in shape, save money;

just the usual things – except, perhaps, to visit Gísli Súrsson’s murder site –

but I didn’t think I’d be shepherding

with men in ski pants and fishermen’s jumpers.

One of them is five hundred metres up the side of Arnardalur, Eagle Dale,

with three white dots who remember summer’s freedom

but still run themselves into the farmer’s yard,

where we, the chasers, meet later for legs of lamb with rhubarb jam.

“Hold the line,” yells a man, “and keep close to the river,

while I take the small rise on the other side”;

the river is the only clarity in a valley of bog, fog, and blueberries,

the company of sheep still two hundred metres away.

But one old dear, apart from the others on a spit of stones,

looking like a torn pillow on cheap barbecue legs,

stamps me to be gone, to leave the winter to herself alone,

spare her my good will.

I huff, yelp, and whoosh in reply, step closer, jump, walk around,

I look friendly and jolly and hold my ground,

I tell her that the others have gone ahead; she kicks,

no, yes, no, come on!

(2004)