Poetry: As I lay still

I remember the man dying on the platform in the Gare d'Austerlitz train sttation in Paris, first time I can ever say I saw life leave a man.  It was truly disturbing and then his wife, in the throes of a great despair in watching the ambulance attendants try and try and try, all for naught.  He was in my train car, he would have slept in the room next to mine.  He collapsed and had a heart attack right in front of the door to my room and I didn't know at the moment why everyone was gathering, I was 6 people behind the collapsed man on the floor in the middle of the train car and I started to get annoyed at the delay--typical new yorker I thought.  Eventually we all left the train car and they brought his body out to the platform to have more space to work on him.  Another man, a Frenchman, complained that now that the train was delayed he'd miss his connection and insisted to the conductor he be refunded.  A crowd gathering around heard his complaints and turned on him.  A small mob almost assaulted him, he needed to be escorted off the platform by police because everyone was so infuriated by the man's insensitivity to the fact that this man was now dead and all he cared about was his refund.  Quite a scene I must say.

As I lay still

Long gone travels return.

They come to me as I lay still in bed,

drifting, head propped up on cool pillows.
 

They come down through the sky;

lightening, thrust fiercely through

the heavy envelope of darkness,
interfering with the night's caress

of a far off Castilian hillside.
 

They come to remind me of the unexpected,

of the easy travel from life into death,

the last breath of Parisian air taken by that man

who lay dying on the train station platform.

The Gare d’ Austerlitz was just the beginning for me

and his wife, as she stood over his body,

convulsing with despair, she had begun

her sudden long travel into loneliness.