Bus Shelters and Tunnels

 

Bus Shelters and Tunnels

 

Manchester refuses to swim into being

and cannot yet coalesce

but Sheffield is there – bits of it –

 

Bramall Lane, a child asking Wednesday,

some block-built offices where he worked,

cars cross-stitching a double deck viaduct

and rumpled paths in steep-vallied woods.

 

A rail divides this concrete bus shelter

in brutalist hollow paneled kicked out glass,

framed Winter winds are blistering skin,

his small hands need a good mittening.

 

Maybe two others there, too,

it’s of no consequence – what’s piquing

and forming in his mind are hollows.

One, either end. Why? How can

passengers find shelter there, when air

must funnel in at that end, then this?

Where is the warmth, middling bliss,

of the balming womby fleece?

 

They may or may not

have got on a bus,

but, in any case, with nothing like the fuss

of a jump cut, he’s taken,

across a road near Bocking Lane

looking down to stare at trains.

 

Leans over that drystone wall

built of rocks, raises a call

that echoes through thickets,

over trails and rooty rough mud track,

he’d picked his way through that,

holding Aunty Jean’s rough hands.

 

Tunneling far below in miniature

like a thin metal needle through unsewn sampler,

thunders the 1155 to Manchester.