David Mason: Three Poems

Across the Pyrenees

We had to change. Iberian rails

were a wider gauge. The tricorn hats

of the Guardia Civil glared in the rain.

Their submachine guns glared, and that’s

 

how we knew Franco was still alive.

The sleepy passengers packed in,

leaned on baskets or thigh to thigh

as steel on steel made a lurching whine

 

and we were moving through the night,

the Spanish night, the civil war

of books fresh in my memory

and in the looks these faces bore,

 

till a man whose thin, unshaven face

was wan with sleeplessness pulled down

a bota full of wine and squeezed

a long stream into his open mouth

 

and smiled, passing the bag to me.

It was my first goatskin of wine.

He showed me how to tip my head

and squeeze the skin until a line

 

of fruit and sunlight filled my mouth

with a sweat and leather aftertaste.

I passed the skin to a young girl

across from me who wore a chaste

 

black sweater, but drank the wine

in a long, slow, practiced pull

and shook her pretty head and laughed.

The old man called it “blood of the bull,”

 

slicing slabs of cheese with a knife

while his plump wife busied herself

paring apples from a plastic sack

she’d taken down from the luggage shelf.

 

These too were passed among us, bread

and wine, cheese and fruit, and I

had nothing to offer my companions

but a word of thanks they waved away.

 

Yes—it happened many years ago

in the passing dark of northern Spain.

Some strangers shared their food with me

in the dim light of the night train.

 

David Mason

 

 

 

 

 

The Student

Just hours before he went to hang himself

he smiled at me and promised poems would come,

then waved goodbye, apprentice to the word.

 

He lived. But in fractions. A feeding tube

uncoiling from his abdomen. His aunt

and mother held him still to shave his face.

 

I bent and kissed the boy. He mouthed the air

and murmured what we hoped was meaning speech.

He wasn’t fully made when he strung up

 

his life. His instrument was still untuned.

That was a year ago. Word comes of struggle,

as if a strangled soul would find the strength

 

to love what wasn’t wholly there before,

only the promised happiness of song

beyond the comprehension of the mind.

 

What else could explain the effort to crawl back

among the living, for whom speech is easy

but understanding never comes in peace?

 

David Mason

 

 

Security Light

The glow outside our window is no fallen star.

It is futility itself. It is the fear of night

a neighbor burns with, nightmare of a stubborn child.

 

I dreamed of chasing crows in a dark of sea fog

and no wind, the chill smell of kelp and changing things,

knowing the sea’s edge and the sand met where the fish lived.

 

I saw the waters running out to meet the water

coming in, the small crabs lifted off their claws.

I saw the trysting place of cormorants, the cliffs

 

of guarded nests where eagles watched like sated kings

alive, alive at the moving sand clock of the sea

where all’s dissolved, where earth itself is taken down.

 

David Mason