In her plum-colored stockings
and her black skirt and shoes,
she walks the length of the train.
The only passengers
are children and women.

All are bared to the waist.
She walks as if to bring herself
sooner to the ocean, recalling
the brown mist of the northern
evening pushing against the panes.

In the abandoned greenhouse
she sprawled face down
amid the shattered plant pots
in an ashy mess of dried loam
and black geranium roots.

He stood at the door, with all
the men of the household; she felt
his stare move like a razor
from her black party slippers
and ankle socks up the backs of her legs.

In the windows of the train
there is nothing; even when the blinds
are raised, the light against the glass
blazes in paper-blank monotone
off the sea and shore.

His voice smashed the door
like a buckshot blast.
At the halt she crosses the bleached
boards and gazes over the sand
and the horizonless brassy water.

The train trembles into a silence
sustained by the rasp
of grasshoppers in the bristling dunes.
The sweat shivers down her backbone
to her soaked waistband.

She wipes the hair from her face.
It is then that the goats come,
their bleating mimicking
an event in her own hurt throat. She was
wrapped in a dirty towel, unable to move.

She rubbed a hole in the fog
of the bathroom mirror and faced
the white-lipped urchin, her hair
filled with splintered glass. She was,
at that moment, his only child.

The goats, herded by loan outriders,
lurch and stumble out of the white
distance, bearded heads and
twisted horns jerking, slack udders
and bollocks swinging.

She sat on the bed a long time
with the cellophane packet
in her hands. The new stockings,
their color pleased her. To forgive
her flaws had taken a long time.

And when she drew the slithery
plum skin up over her knee,
its texture pleased her.
Her breasts, their shape and weight
for the very first time pleased her.

When he came home to scrub the atrocity
of the ten-year war out of his pores,
she fell upon him.
Under the painted eyes of his G.I. bride,
the bathtub filled with blood.

The goats are driven between her
and the sea; their stink and outcry
follows them beyond the dunes.
Now there is only
the interminable train-ride home.

The instant of passion—
when, in a landscape virtually
uneventful, the fragmentary past returns—
with all its violences—reveals
that forgiveness was long foregone.