Saturday 13 October 2012

Bus note 23

I'm alone on the lower deck
of the number one, a bunch
of orange chrysanthemums
with lime green eyes on my lap.
        The flowers shout out; perverted daisies
        (in Old English, it's daes eage).     
We pass what was the deaf-blind school,
all boarded up now with the stucco stained.
       There are no more lessons happening
        any more, only years and years
of small animals leaving musk traces
in emptied rooms, filling them again with breath.
        The stench must say home to where
        it can't be anything but heard.

4 comments:

  1. Thank you, Sandra. It's good to hear from you.

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  2. This is wonderful, in its surprising turns. Being watched by the lime green eyes of the orange chrysanthemums (perverted day's eyes shouting in protest against their involuntary perversion?) would certainly put one's soul on point. The solitude and silence of the lower deck then put us smack in the midst of enclosure within the mute diorama of the boarded-up stucco-stained deaf-blind school -- where, quite miraculously, instead of feeling suffocated as might have been expected, we discover in the physis of decomposition a whiff of the breath of the process. That is, the process of life (and death). From which, at least, some things may be learned.

    My own late bus ride tonight was one long chilly immersion in the usual silent speechless garish green-fishbowl eddy of urban alienation. A load of dead animals on board might have made things feel a bit more homey. But then, crippled old folk find the oddest sources of consolation, toward that musty, fusty end of the line.

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  3. Thank you, TC.

    Evening bus rides are a grim business. I like your notion of buses as mobile animal graveyards; one would be left with a very select group of passengers.

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