The Train From Barnstaple

'Twas a train we took through the night four nights before, but in the other direction.  It's a slow train, something I remember lamenting when I was still an old adolescent in Europe, slopping through Italy in the summer with the gents, but this is an entirely different story now, isn't it.  It's England in the winter with the love of my life.  It's green frost covered pastures twinkling in the early light.  It's fields of white swans with long necks, elegant and demure.  It's old bridges and silent streams, slow rivers of magic, like this train.  It's the unseen grip of laughter I hold over Oliver with a single finger.

Like running horses in the still air.
Like Claire.

Eyes like the grass and eyes like the greystone.  It's moss on the dead tree bark, and in the distance.  In a moment all the sheep on a distant hill set down on folded knees, not grazing, not moving.  Still water sits and the smoke rises.  The old brick and the stone holds, and the thatched roofs too, here and there.  Romance and quick dreams between streams just like Claire.

"She is England to me. She is tea in the morning and at three. She is sure, she's unsteady. She is free. She's Excalibur. I must have her," says the pheasant to me past the trees on no breeze, set by himself in red armor.  He is free.