Edinburgh Buses

Strolling around it’s not so changed –
Glasgow still has its Lasses
all cheek bones
and button-nose, grouted faces;
Edinburgh still speaks in masonry
and living rock,
behind stage-backdrop skies.

Semi-known faces negotiate roads,
frequent coffee shops –
voices and noises take their pitch
in the key of noon.
Yet slicing through the scene’s
murmured sounds,
I cannot help noticing

the buses –
their destinations
inscribed on their foreheads
with haughty purpose,

each one plying toward a place
much missed,
where a shackled memory
lays sleeping;

OCEAN TERMINAL
(where her and I wept the end)

CRAMOND
(where we sauntered one weekend)

MORNINGSIDE
(“where all became a burning mist...”)

Pleasant –
the unexpected
refraction of thought,
their laborious presence provokes.

And as evening weighs its tender jaw
on lambent streets,
now bristling with twilight enterprise
my gaze again meets

the bus’s: their brows
now showing in yellow
the towns
and memory lanes

this time
strapped with a warning –
of history’s dusk
and future’s mourning
in hideous glare:

Look at the past, of course,
But whatever you do,
Don’t stare