Classic Poem

In the dawn twilight,
cold on the glass door a fingerprint,
the vague whitening rim of hills
is as funereal as mercury
but the travelers still not awake from sleep,
tired sighs of lamps alone are clamorous.
When the cloying smell of varnish
or the smoke of cigarettes, there, not there,
feels desolate to the tongue ravaged on the night train,
how badly the married woman must take it upon herself and grieve.
Have we still not passed Yamashina?
Loosening the metal valve of her air pillow
and letting it sigh—the way she feels;
the two of us, sad, nestle to each other
and look out the window of the train near the eastern clouds:
in a mountain village, place unknown,
flowers of columbines blooming quite white.