Roads we travel on, eyes half open,
Lulled by the rattle of wheels.
Eyes we fix on the division
Between here and there:
Spattered panes in bus windows;
And the passing verges blur,
The faces of fellow travellers
Hang transparent, drowned in shadow.
Roads shake the spirit,
Run the soul ragged
For the sake of going.
Metal springs and fixings bend.
In secret they complain, creaking
As the coachwork leans into corners.
Eyes, my eyes, I can see them looking back.
I, too, am in shadow with highlights
On my creases and my crows feet.
The rest of me hides in darkness
Except for a gleam of reflected sky
On the curve of my eyes,
My own, my hollow eyes.
Eyes like mine
Whose fascination for clouds,
Compels me to look for some truth
In the sky amongst shifting weather,
Come rain, come shine.
Today I see white cumulus,
Hard-edged against blue:
Clouds where faces, familiar faces,
Forgotten, long-departed, gone,
Drift from reality to myth.
Roads. These tangled roads recede;
The half-world in which I travel
Releases me into a dreaming sky.
The crowded bus speeds beneath it,
Pursuing the relentless, predictable journey
Until, when evening descends at last,
I will become the twilight; I will fall silent
And darken in the lost colours of night.
Later, thin, banded stratus
Ascends into stratocumulus
Below hazy cirrus in a mackerel sky.
On this road, nimbus brings rain,
Which arrives, slanted and heavy,
And with it, with the moon among the stones,
In my eyes, the roadsides glisten.
© BH, 2016
Was on a bus. Looked at a sky much like this. Travel has the same effect on me. The phrase ‘fascinated by clouds’ came. I wrote it in a note. Later this spawned itself. Probably after too many years on buses and trains staring at the world, my own reflection and the hazy reflections of others. And just wondering why.
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