somniat 28: can you run?

somniat 28 – can you run?

There are flowers all along the walls,
blazing flowers of gold that bend and sparkle
whenever our light shines upon them;
they are set amid scenes of pastoral beauty,
splendid trees with soft leaves covered in dew
and clear brooks that flow with nurturing water;
there are even nymphs wreathed and garlanded
in the salubrious air of fathomless space;
and all of it together moves with us as we move;
it’s a delicate work of art crafted carefully
into the wall of the ancient train station;
part sculpture, part painting,
it still holds its potent vibrancy
even after all these years of seclusion
and even under the mere gaze
of a simple flashlight
whose light is slowly fading.

I can feel a breeze,
I tell my angel.

She knows
more than she has revealed
for now she tells me,
we’re almost under the mountain –
it’s intentional,
the breeze is from the caves;
they built this station
and the accompanying tunnels
in just such a way so as to harness the air
and direct it here
through the station.

She turns off her ailing light
and in the pitch-dark we feel it,
the gentle breath of a thousand dryads
scented with my angel’s natural perfume
and the fresh water of deep mountain streams;
she reaches out and takes my other hand
so that in the darkness
we are standing there, face to face,
close enough
so I can feel for the second time today
the warmth of her body
and the coolness of her soul;
she quotes lines from an old poem:
And the soon-to-be lovers
smile on each other, not yet knowing farewell,
and round about them, like a constellation,
their destiny casts
its nightly spell.

For a moment, I almost believe
that our fates are not sealed
but still open to change
and that maybe there is another way;
but even as I near my angel
so close now I could almost kiss her,
the air begins to change,
the breeze becomes erratic
and is laced with an electric
metallic
poisonous taste;
there is a slight quivering in the floor,
and all around us there is a repeated
tinny chinking
as old fluorescent lights begin to flicker on
and shed their pale, but growing glow
over a station that has remained in the dark
for decades.

All around us the walls have decayed,
and in many places fallen in,
the ceiling’s bright azure sky has faded
and the skillfully carved clouds have mostly collapsed;
so that what was once so beautiful
has now given way to old hanging rusted wires,
gooey leaking pipes that drip into bleak black puddles,
and air ducts half broken and layered in thick dust;
in the dark when we had only our flashlight to guide us,
we had seen the only wall untouched by circumstance
and taken it to be the whole,
but now we see the rest of the station
for what it really is,
dilapidation and decay mixed in and folded up
with wreck and ruin, waste and debris.

In the growing light
we both blush at ourselves
standing so close
and with such thoughts;
my angel lets go of me
and lines come across her face,
she is older than I thought;
her deep eyes shift back and forth restlessly
and her shoulders grow tense
with a frightening momentum.

what is it?
I ask,
what’s wrong?

Her eyes are lost;
she is my celestial guide,
but she does not know what to do,
there’s a train coming,
there’s a train coming,
she blinks back disbelief,
there’s a train coming,
she bites her lower lip
and with her massive and pleading eyes
she looks at me directly
with a fervor that frightens me,
can you run?

[Note: The poem quoted above is Rainer Maria Rilke's "Behind the Blameless Trees,"
which you can read in full here.]

• somniat 40: the general
• somniat 39: where naked angels weep
• somniat 38: devils
• somniat 37: ... and now you are dead
• somniat 36: the dry well
• somniat 35: the grotto
• somniat 34: passages iii
• somniat 33: passages ii
• somniat 32: passages i
• somniat 31: home
• somniat 30: between fate and destiny, part ii
• somniat 29: between fate and destiny, part i
• somniat 28: can you run?
• somniat 27: the lolling tongue
• somniat 26: what the gargoyle saw
• somniat 25: chrysocolla
• somniat 24: heat
• somniat 23: parousiamania
• somniat 22: basalt and ebony
• somniat 21: a festival of stars
• somniat 20: a standoff
• somniat 19: wingless dragonflies
• somniat 18: an exchange between lawyers
• somniat 17: the old cinema
• somniat 16: through the vent
• somniat 15: out and into
• somniat 14: a decision in retrospect
• somniat 13: trust
• somniat 12: utterly beautiful
• somniat 11: spotted
• somniat 10: the men's room
• somniat 9: through the alcove iii
• somniat 8: through the alcove ii
• somniat 7: through the alcove i
• somniat 6: the mountain
• somniat 5: the change
• somniat 4: fear
• somniat 3: numbers
• somniat 2: in shadows
• somniat 1: a place underground