On a night bus

Ewan Whyte

On a night bus between cities,

the overhead lights turned out,

 

a stillness of strangers resting side by side

in their seats.

 

Long after midnight, in the outer darkness,

along the sides of the highway

 

the mangled tree-tops of autumn pass

in a grotesque parade of shapes

 

against a half-moon haze.

While watching a procession-

 

of collapsing monsters our ancestors

would have called gods,  

 

I receive the confirming phone call

that you have died.

 

Most are asleep on this bus from the back

I can hear the sleep-fighting voices

 

of talking children through the silencing

of their mothers.

 

In front a lit-up electronic devise is reflecting

off a window

 

double-imaging the trees on the ceiling.

 

(2)

 

I think of you and your outrageous life-

with its odd mixture of the high and low brow.

 

Your piano playing of Beethoven and Brahms,

your respectful mimicking

 

of Dinu Lipati’s recording of Bach’s Joy of Man’s Desiring  

during his remission from cancer.

 

Your rendering of Bach as a subtle question and answering,

and how you would obsess on the disembodied bliss of static time in art.

 

Your ghost held back from the self-conscious rush to death we all face,

where there for brief moments is no time at all.

 

Against this, there were the hardened strippers you would date.

Bringing them into the church to drink wine

 

and play the organ after the Montreal bars closed. 

Your comment that this urge against the sacrosanct

 

is in all of us to smash past an image to get to what is behind it

to find only other persona. You said you had grown tired of this.

 

Your weeklong bush walks of a hundred  miles.

Your interpretation of Colville’s painting, Dog and Bridge,

 

the frozen instant of the dog crossing a bridge

where brooding imminence is created

 

by the carefully constructed geometrical design

drawing our line of sight to the German Sheppard, centre right

 

intensifying our sense of impending violence.  

You spoke of the storms of sorrow that would come back on you-

 

the ordained demons of darkness hovering near you,

an aching loneliness, that could only be taken away by impersonal art.

 

Passing into a town, the opposing traffic charges toward the bus

in a sudden heart-pounding rush of blood.

 

I block the headlights, covering one eye,

losing myself in the central yellow line on the road. 

 

After a time, I look up, waking into a changed landscape

to the sound of  Mozart’s Twinkle Twinkle Little Star

 

in the voices of small children from the back of the bus,

through their mother’s gentle words about sleep.

 

 

 

Ewan Whyte is a writer and translator. He has written for the Globe & Mail and The Literary Review of Canada. He is the author of two books of essays: Desire Lines: Essays on Art Poetry & Culture, Shifting Paradigms: Essays on Art & Culture, and Entrainment, a book of poetry, as well as a translation of the rude ancient Roman poet Catullus.