Old Men on the Way to Yoshino

(being fiction, or something like it, that echoes reality - written months ago)

I see them looking in at me, through the windows. Really, only one looks. The others are drowsing, nodding - not bowing - and scratching or talking. Lines collapse their once wide, flat, round faces into rugged landscapes, river valleys, fissures and ravines. I will never be one of these old men. I don't know that I want to be. When I think of being old, I'm on a porch in a swing, not on a train. I already have the hat. I already feel some aches. Some days, I am already shindoi, like the lines on the old mens' faces betray them to be.

There is a girl. (Truly, there are many girls. But I mean particularly one whom I wish to know. More.) She has gloss-glistening lips and kakkoi megane (red with black temples, half-lenses), works in a hospital, emails occasionally. I think some days of how we'd raise a child, where we'd make a home, how we'd survive one another. I am not afraid. This courage -- no. Courage is to strive when every impulse is to tremble. This calm -- yes, far more appropriate -- is new, and perhaps it's even näive. C'est la vie (since we're speaking French). I think of sleeping next to her, and it feels wholly foreign. I have slept in foreign arms, but it's not the ethnically alien that I sense -- she is of another ethic. She is cut not only from silk (to my flannel), but in a different pattern, with a different tool. She is the product of pinking shears, and me a razor blade.

The train shuffles on, a great beast dragging its lonely carcass through the tunnels, across bridges, gasping in relief at every station, sighing before starting up again.

It's an old man, too, on its way to Yoshino.