share


Flatlands

Horses and geese in a sodden field.
Solitaries with luggage on a wet platform.
Postage-stamp house on a bit of land,
a copse, a fold, a quadrant of wood,
lines of beech, lines of poplar,
miniature commentary magnified
in the glass, winter streaking the window,
the train bearing, not bearing the weight
within. Let this not be thought
(one thought to oneself), non-
thoughts of passengers on the way forward
backward through the hour.

 


ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR

Saskia Hamilton is the author of As for Dream (2001), Divide These (2005), Canal (2005), and Corridor (forthcoming 2014). She is also the editor of The Letters of Robert Lowell (2005) and co-editor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (2008). She teaches at Barnard College, Columbia University.



READ NEXT

Essay

Issue No. 20

Notes on the history of a detention centre

Felix Bazalgette

Essay

Issue No. 20

Looking back at Harmondsworth as he left, after 52 days inside, Amir was struck by how isolated the detention...

fiction

Issue No. 12

A Samurai Watches the Sun Rise in Acapulco

Álvaro Enrigue

TR. Rahul Bery

fiction

Issue No. 12

To Miquel   I possess my death. She is in my hands and within the spirals of my inner...

poetry

February 2013

Social Contract

Les Kay

poetry

February 2013

Formally, I and the undersigned— What? Use, like Mama said, your imagination if you still have one where scripts...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required