10 The room itself
- No sunset to be seen from the train that day,
- just fluorescent light flickering overhead;
- …& now a dusk of cigarette smoke
- gathering in the stale compartment.
-
- Serbia’d blurred into motion
- & into bubbles rising in a bottle of beer.
-
- Some Yugoslav soldiers on leave,
- who were the ones who were smoking,
- talked as they smoked,
- & their conversation,
- which they were trying to draw me into
- (though I knew none of their words)
- was almost visible,
- like the dialogue above the drawn-in heads
- of a cartoon-strip –
-
- But a cartoon strip to which an eraser
- at the end of a long yellow pencil
- had been brought,
- making it a gray smudge in the air –
-
- and I was coughing.