Night Pillion

Eleven struck. The traffic lights were green.
The shuddering machine let out its roar
As we sprang forward into brilliant streets.
Beyond your shoulders and helmet the walls rose
Well into darkness, mounted up, plunged past —
Hunting the clouds that hunted the few stars.
And now the neons thinned, the moon was huge.
The gloomy river lay in a glory, the bridge
In its mists as we rode over it slowly sighed.
We lost the shining tram lines in the slums
As we kept south; the shining trolley-wires
Glinted through Gorbals; on your helmet a glint hung.
A cat in a crumbling close-mouth, a lighted window
With its shadow-play, a newspaper in the wind —
The night swept them up even as we slowed,
Our wheels jolting over the buckled causeys.
But my net swept up night and cat and road
And mine is the shadow-play that window showed
And mine the paper with its cries and creases.
— Shadow-play? What we flashed past was life
As what we flash into is life, and life
Will not stand still until within one flash
Of words or paint or human love it stops
Transfixed, and drops its pain and grime
Into forgetful time.
But I remember: I saw the flash: and then
We met the moonlit Clyde again, swung off
And roared in a straight run for Rutherglen.
The wind whistled by the football ground
And by the waste ground that the seagulls found.
The long wail of a train recalled the city
We had left behind, and mingled with the wind.
Whatever it was that sang in me there
As we neared home, I give it no name here.
But tenements and lives, the wind, our wheels,
The vibrant windshield and your guiding hands
Fell into meaning, whatever meaning it was —
Whatever joy it was —
And my blood quickened in me as I saw
Everything guided, vibrant, where our shadow
Glided along the pavements and the walls.
Perhaps I only saw the thoroughfares,
The river, the dancing of the foundry-flares?
Joy is where long solitude dissolves.
I rode with you towards human needs and cares.

Edwin Morgan
(1956)