Michael Lithgow: a child sleeps on the bus

 

a child sleeps on the bus

 

A child sleeps on the bus with his mouth slightly open.

Crowded around him are men and women in parkas; 

confusion, sleepiness and isolation are like a cloudy

light.  Morning rush.  There is a bit of dream in the air,

and the hard eyes of a poor man are cast down

into the gravel and debris on the floor.  Everywhere

there are sleeping giants. The boy is dreaming that he is

everywhere. When the bus bangs on the road his eyes flutter,

open momentarily, then close. It is hard enough

to dream on a bus.  The windows are splattered with dry salt.

The confusion is not so hard to understand, like tumbling

in dreams.  We make sense of it until we wake.

The morning light pries. The bus heaves with the lights,

bodies jostle one another against the next, they touch,

everywhere flicked eyes and heads look away

refusing this intimacy.  The dream of the boy changes,

loses its shape, opens.  There is a snarl of sound,

the bus machinery grinding us down, traffick gunning

on the road, a kind of churning. Down goes up

when you fly in a dream, your body becomes light

and you float and travel so long as confusion

and dread don't break through, and everywhere 

you find memory, patterns that are yours. Open a door

and your childhood pops out. The dream

has a lurching rhythm of its own, a jumble.

The boy's dream fills the bus, reaches out through tiny

fibrils of light touching everyone. Even when his eyes

open we remain delicately entwined. Even the man

with the downcast eyes is touched by the light, a bag of tins

at his feet, the bus smelling of his tins.

 

 

from Undercurrents: New Voices in Canadian Poetry

Ed. Robyn Sarah (Cormorant Books, 2011)

supplementary material for a review soon to appear in The Rover.