Cabin fever & Star power (after Julie Christie)
by Sophie Mayer
[ poetry - july 08 ]
Cabin fever
All night we travel
blind through trainscapes
abandoned to the snow,
windowscapes, winterscapes
already memories of
our journey there
and back again we re-
mark the flatness with
silver tracks, coursing
like a stream or sleep
we are fallen into, lulled
by wind and primal
smallness, bodies held or
harboured like possessions
neat in each narrow closet,
the lowered blind cabins
us in each other's shadow
breathing like a curling
hand dangling from bunk
to bunk, dropping with crumbs
of our midnight feast,
our heat suspending us
in nowhere, nothing
to it but the rhythm.
Star power (after Julie Christie)
Night finds the gold in us,
a skin thing: you laugh and
your laugh is liquid
assets. What gilds us
corrodes. You're the red
in the landscape: the seam,
the stream. So tell me, what
does a star wish on?
How does a star
turn itself on?
It's been said you're made
of stone. Of glass. Of ice.
You've been rendered
speechless. It's a stitch-up.
All this brilliance
a sequined costume
for the headline:
we are here. And we
burn. Unshaken,
we are ghosts of it,
fragments and pale
imitators, as stars are:
gas and grit and mystery
and velocity. Our speed
is light.
