WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE IN TRANSIT?
Samuel Dickson
Watching the overpass above my street
(the one they shut down a couple years ago).
Streaks of yellow-white halogen formed a oneness in the morning’s low light,
one line of motor traffic towering above my head as I waited in the
infant minutes of the day, spellbound, cold and wondering.
Spray flecked up and over the sides when it rained, each passing car
preserved for a moment in sheets of falling water,
rippling and uneven, stained with slick.
Like a snakeskin drawn over too great a surface,
ripping, writhing, descending, torn apart by unseen hands,
spilling out onto the street,
filling the street with its innards, filling my shoes
as I walked beneath on the road to Damascus.
Into the mustiness of the train,
damp mixed in with the slurry of human stench.
The performance of rites
hangs in the air.
Fog on the train windows, the same creeping
fog that made its home on my car’s front windscreen.
It may never come unstuck, perhaps I will come
unstuck
or be engulfed, as if fog were flame and I
a rotting tinderbox.
There is revelation to be gained
in overheard chit-chat (such a shame I do not listen).
They speak their incantations as the carriage
convulses on its tracks,
thrashing like someone choked. I am
the catch in its throat.
Interrupted
by the cold comfort of a thousand lunchtime walks
that blend a thousand lunchtimes, a thousand
walks, each as distinct as the other.
A pilgrimage of the everyday
taken in hour-long blocks that might mean something were they stacked together.
I have walked the jostled streets of holy cities
and thought them swallowed by necromancy, steeped in unabridged shadow.
Only by an accident of providence did I look up
and see -
- the buildings were of sheer rock and on every
height was a golden tabernacle whose walls
wept beneath a golden sun.
This lower world and the next, divided by shining intervals.
I must return home.
Every half bump and stultified shudder of the bus,
its every secret motive and tacit inclination on the road,
is laid bare in my mind.
Its movements play as a charm-song
whose unfailing rhythm inscribes an enchantment upon my mind.
Despite years unplayed and words unsaid,
it shall remain with me a tune that cannot die
or be unmade by added passages.
No accumulation of added sense shall drive it out
or wrest that spell an octave or a breath,
no number nor depth of experiences shall dilute its potency,
unerring clarity, terrible and comprehensible.
All these, the prefixed roads, tracks, and footpaths
on which my soul is set to run,
have rendered me a drudger between the worlds
and life
a Drudgery.
Samuel Dickson is a collection of sense experiences held together by a localised feeling of first-person subjectivity. Truly, who could say that anyone was anything at all? He also happens to be a Philosophy student at Macquarie University.
