And the countryside is still tonight
This train into the Paris sunset mist
Through the wet steam above the evening tracks
Someone leaves town, someone arrives

Into blues, jazz and smoke
Drinking black coffee at the Bastille Café
Past the Opera and the Grands
Falling into a floating carnival

This still season that slowly begins
The way that the long winter ended
Under the flash-frozen suburbia moon,
Trapped in photographs
The Eiffel Tower a dull sketch.

Elegant mute lights along the River Seine
Irrevocable in that sense
Where one person crosses Fascination Street
While another turns blue in the blur of rain.
And music, the expressive violins
That makes us all opposites
To ourselves, and occasionally

(cruel) prisoners.
Somehow, the season’s madness had not yet begun
You think of Blake’s Hell
And almost smile

(thinking) the guillotine of loneliness
Threatens you.
All those hung over mornings, eyes wide
You stumble through the crowded cobwebs
In strange gardens, trembling
Laughing

Falsely real
Watching the train disappear, again
And you turn away from the faded picture
On the dirty wall. Sunset in your town
Is never quite the same.

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