The Last 46A Home, With the Rain Writing on the Glass

There is a particular hour in Dublin when the buses stop being transport and start being shelter. I have spent a fair part of my life on the top deck of the 46A, and most of my poems about leaving work were half-written there, in the steam of other people's coats.

The Poem

Top Deck, Front Seat

The rain has learned my handwriting.
It loops across the window
in the long slant I use for shopping lists,
for sorry, for home soon.

Below us, Donnybrook goes soft at the edges,
the chipper a smudge of yellow,
the church a darker kind of dark.

A man behind me is asleep
with his mouth open like a letterbox.
A girl in a hockey jersey
draws a heart in the fog
and then, thinking better of it,
a small boat.

The driver takes the corner
the way you'd lift a child,
carefully, as if the whole bus
might wake and cry.

I wipe a hole in the glass
the size of my palm
and the city looks back through it,
wet and patient,
a dog waiting at a door.

Nobody speaks.
We are all of us
being carried.

Why the Bus

People ask why I write so much about buses, and the honest answer is that it is the only place I am allowed to do nothing. At my desk, doing nothing is a failure. At home it is guilt. But on the 46A, between Stillorgan and the stop at the top of my road, nothing is the whole job. You sit. You are moved.

There is a kindness in that which I did not notice for years. The driver does not know any of us, and yet he brakes gently for the woman with the shopping bags. The girl draws a boat instead of a heart, and I like to think she was protecting something.

The rain writes on the glass, and for once I let something else do the writing.

A Small Practice

If you take a bus home tonight, try this:

• Sit upstairs if you can, near the front.
• Leave your phone in your pocket until the third stop.
• Find one stranger's small gesture and keep it, like a ticket.

That is all a poem is, really. A ticket you forgot to throw away, found weeks later in a coat, still warm with the night it came from.

Cover: Photo by Mateo Krossler on Unsplash.