Salt runs through this short poem: salt in the air, salt in the tears, and, by the end, something like the sting of rereading an old love letter. Luca Flauto builds a seaside walk out of a few plain images, then lets a bridge carry the weight of memory. The central idea is that the past never quite goes away. It stays in view, like a bridge fixed in one place, and like handwriting that remains legible under the lines struck through it.
The opening is a small act of geometry. "Up, the train / down, the sea" sets two things on a vertical axis, and the poem suggests a coastal place where the railway runs high above the shore. The commas make the lines feel like quick glances, first up, then down. In the second stanza the speakers are "walking down at the beach / with our noses up," so the up-and-down pattern is now in their bodies. They have descended to the sand but keep their faces lifted, toward the bridge, the gulls, the sky. It is a gentle, almost comic image, and it also suggests looking for something above you that you can't quite reach.
The sounds do a lot of the work. "Loving the salty sound / the salty tears" repeats "salty" so that sea and weeping become one substance. The phrase "salty sound" is also a small mix-up of the senses, since taste turns into hearing, as if the whole shoreline were being absorbed through the skin. The line has no clear subject, because we are never told who is doing the loving. That vagueness lets the feeling belong to the sea, the speaker and the "you" at once. The repeated s-sounds ("salty," "sound," "seagull") hiss like waves, and "damp clouds" carries the same wetness into the sky, so the weather seems to cry along with the person on the beach.
Then comes the poem's most deliberate move: "The bridge is still looking." Giving the bridge eyes turns a piece of engineering into a witness. The word "still" works twice, meaning both "continuing" and "motionless." The bridge keeps watching because it cannot move. Beside it the seagull is "floating / through the damp clouds," a verb-less fragment that looks light and free by comparison. The two images set permanence against drift, and the people on the beach seem to sit somewhere between them.
The third stanza repeats the line, "It's still looking," and stretches it "from the past / to the future." A bridge joins two sides, and here the sides are times. The stanza is only three short lines, and its shortness makes the sentence feel like a span. The poem has been shrinking from five lines to five to three, and the lines get quieter as the thought gets bigger.
The last stanza is a quiet pun. "Crossed like wrong words / on an old paper" brings "crossed" in two senses: crossing a bridge and crossing out a mistake. Because the sentence has no clear grammatical anchor, we can't tell what is crossed. It might be the bridge's gaze, or the line between past and future, or the lovers themselves. The "wrong words" are "love letters," and the poem leaves open whether the love was wrong or only the phrasing. Anyone who has struck out a sentence knows that a crossed-out word is still readable. It is cancelled but not erased. That is how the poem treats memory, and it fits the tears on the face in the first stanza.
The pronouns follow the same movement. "Your face" is observed from outside, "our noses" brings the two people together, and "you wrote" pushes the other person back into the past. The poem moves from togetherness to a single absent hand.
There is no rhyme and almost no punctuation beyond the occasional comma and full stop, so the poem reads like a glance rather than a formal statement. The numeral "II" in the title suggests it belongs to a longer sequence, though the poem works well alone. It is significant because it takes a familiar subject, lost love, and avoids saying anything direct about it. A train, a bridge, a gull and some salt do the speaking instead, and the poem trusts the reader to notice what is crossed out and still visible.