the ideologue (part III -- near Labin, Croatia)

. * part 3 of a poem already published in a well-respected
journal -- this is the draft version of course* . though i think
it may be retitled --- RIDE and RIDICULE

The bus cannot be painted, he says.
it is always moving, side to side, or rolling
raucously, and it rains when mouths are open,
when dips in the road elegantly flow.
"The bus", it speaks slowly, on and on
with an insurmountable flare... i'm alone now,
like another man, sitting at a window in a blue t-shirt,
twisting a cigarette package,
his adroit nervous fingers
unable to reach that greater pause. The length
of his emotions growing shorter, shredding
like a forested hillside that hovers above
a newly carved gravel quarry.

The bus cannot go faster, he says.
This highway is lodged between steep repeating hills,
is as gray as the chimney of a meek village chapel.
It moves like smoke undaunted, like three pines, tall,
sparse, peaking from the apex of a treacherous corner,
it turns like rare food in a weary traveller's stomach.
It is a bucket of conversations,
two businessmen squeezed together, (behind me),
cajoling the prospects for another seaside hotel;
a young girl, cell-phone tucked within a pillow,
promptly saying, or so it seems
from an acute angle, i'll see you soon.

the bus cannot be inert, he says. his accent,
though it is not local, replies like an autumn morning
amid a dearth of luminant steel.
The sun, slow to arrive, commisserates
with a cool fog at the end of a long canal;
the road, its agony unknown, a skeleton
stretching from century to century
to gasps of quotidian time... I am alone still,
breathing lightly, reading a map,
(an arrival plan), believing the Roman Amphitheatre
and the bus station in the city of Pula remain in the places
they always were.