Poem
Patrick McGuinness
Gare centrale
Gare centrale
Gare centrale
I had it for a moment, quick as the clash of two winds on a rooftop:the smell of barley, hops, fresh diesel and its negative – used air;
then Belga smoke over the exhalations of the waffel-stand:
This feeling of penetrating misery is sponsored by Brussels
City Council in association with SNCB announced a voice
in white over the station tannoy. I filed this one away between
two stops, between Bruxelles-Nord and Bruxelles-
Midi, between the word départ, so definitive and final,
and the word partance, an ongoing going, a leaving
still entangled in itself years later like the sound of a train
turning the corner, its siren coiled around the echo of the last to go
and the tunnel taking a moulding of our departures.
© 2010, Patrick McGuinness
From: Jilted City
Publisher: Carcanet, Manchester
From: Jilted City
Publisher: Carcanet, Manchester
Patrick McGuinness
(Tunisia, 1968)
Patrick McGuinness is a poet, novelist, translator and academic, a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, where he has taught since 1998. He lives in North West Wales. His poetry, published by Carcanet, has won an Eric Gregory Award, the American Poetry Foundations Levinson Prize in 2003, the Poetry Business Prize in 2006, ...
Poems
Poems of Patrick McGuinness
Close
Gare centrale
I had it for a moment, quick as the clash of two winds on a rooftop:the smell of barley, hops, fresh diesel and its negative – used air;
then Belga smoke over the exhalations of the waffel-stand:
This feeling of penetrating misery is sponsored by Brussels
City Council in association with SNCB announced a voice
in white over the station tannoy. I filed this one away between
two stops, between Bruxelles-Nord and Bruxelles-
Midi, between the word départ, so definitive and final,
and the word partance, an ongoing going, a leaving
still entangled in itself years later like the sound of a train
turning the corner, its siren coiled around the echo of the last to go
and the tunnel taking a moulding of our departures.
From: Jilted City
Gare centrale
Sponsors
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère