Bahnhof Cafe Poem by Grahame Lockey

At the end of escalators out, wind
drives rain hard into the face -
umbrellas can't withstand it.

This weather dries in the hair and clothes
of those in the Bahnhof Cafe,
a crowd without announcements
to listen for. They don't have time
to knock espresso back, to grab
a bite, to eat the rest later. Beggars,
bird-scarers, spoon-burners, bums
they have time to set the photos
on the wall straight, see shifts change.

The till-girl yawns.
Abstracted Turks with brooms
sweep the just-swept floor
or, with fraying yellow cloths,
squint out crumbs on tables,
unguarded cups and saucers.
There's something about this place
that brooms and cloths don't deal with.

At his uncleared table,
some old scarecrow mutters with himself
stirring his beer with a spoon,
now and again resetting his sack
at a different angle to his feet.
Young men, butch with indifference,
croak rough-tongued talk
towards women with denim-bitten crotches
who have chewed immanicurable
the nails they lick last varnish off.
A jam flares up.
A man starts clapping, another two
turn round, but others scunner
as if they've sucked on the lemon wedge
a fourth man throws to shut them up.

Once there,
chairs pulled across from other tables,
few seem to leave the Bahnhof Cafe,
though arrivals
keep hunching through the leather curtain
that complicates the doorway.
Some towards a nod of recognition,
become anonymous again.

It is not the conversation-shouters
but the loners, propped by single tables,
fingers on their drinks,
and the fat, unlooked-at wives
who first seem lured.
To keep their stares
from sticky, yellowing walls
some pictures have been hung, almost evenly,
of places they could choose to catch a train to.
They pull the uncompanioned
under a knife-edge of sheer Alp,
into level-headed cornfields,
onto Heidi-happy hillsides, and
for a while, they might forget
the station, its cafe, the torn drum
someone's rapping with a fork -
its idle beat
the beat heard when their ear's on a pillow -
tomorrow is another long lie in.

One by one they notice
that they have to put their jackets
round their chairs;
judge the queue at the counter.
They drink because life's dry,
because they're stuck
like a disused boat
on the sand-bank of a childhood
they sprinted through
or did not have.
Here, at the powdery edge of distension,
they squeeze their thumbs for rain.

It's not a train they're waiting for -
these are people going nowhere -
it's a change in the weather.