Robbie Gamble
Robbie Gamble (he/him) is the author of A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in Post Road, RHINO, Rust + Moth, Salamander, and The Sun. He divides his time between Boston and Vermont.
On the Train from Edinburgh to King’s Cross
The land is fast-receding out the window
a conveyor of pastoral undulations, fields flocked
in turn with creamy tuffets of languid sheep
and the dark angles of crows. I am worn down
by this leaden skyline and the self-righteous cacophony
of factions in my newsfeed, and the only destination
I am drawn towards is a seat alongside victims of their
cruelty. But I no longer know how to get there. I think of
Philip Larkin, commuting southwest from Hull to London,
peering into a procession of trackside courtyards,
catching fragments of Whitsun wedding rites underway.
Larkin the loner, his verse by turns pissy and angelic,
walled off from inexplicable layers of matrimony
by a rattling pane of glass. So it is for me and suffering:
this contented travel with my beloved in time of wars,
the Holy Spirit a sputtering flicker somewhere far offstage.
We too saw wedding parties, along Edinburgh’s Royal Mile,
weaving through touristy throngs, punctuated by seagull cries
and bagpipes ricocheting off the smoky stone facades,
grooms and brides and their pastel-hued retinues
trailing a glaze of alcohol as they cosplayed their way
into an intention of lifelong commitment. Such a brash
swerve out upon this indifferent simmering planet.
Southward we clatter, and fields yield to suburban
metastases, high-rises sprout, graffities clad the trestles
and transformer stations as brazenly as in Madrid
or the Bronx. One more dinner and a bed rest in London,
then we fly home to a festering heat dome and our own
particular folio of national bigotries, where we will not
be out of sight, only someplace else, still bewildered.
