Bus Station
Passengers on the move, not moving,
becalmed in a between place
on the way elsewhere. Dead quiet, staring
intently into their palms.
They are talking with their quick fingers,
eyes flickering, picking up messages,
catching the latest news. They know
the price of gold, what’s happening in Iran,
tomorrow’s weather; they scan the world,
their faces backlit; they are no spectators
but part of the play, tuned in
to a global exchange where thoughts,
facts, rumours, insults zip along wires
like cash on a Baldwin Flyer. It’s off-key,
this silence, it should hum, crackle
with static, we should hear a buzz
pitched just too low for eavesdroppers,
the sound this glow would make, that wells
from a dozen tiny screens
into the room whose windows
are dark with winter, looking out
only on our own reflections.
****
Despite the haunting title poem and other finely observed, Shetland-based studies of seascape and season, in her latest collection Afternoons Go Nowhere Sheenagh Pugh’s alertness to human characters, situations and voices, historical and contemporary, continues undiminished. I like Bus Station not least for its sheer unexpectedness (it’s placed between two more landscape oriented poems) and for the way that as it unfolds it continues to see things clearly, and resist making the obvious judgment. The smartphone users Pugh has assembled in the small bus station are not there to be turned into stereotypes of the misguided modern human, patronised for “staring / intently into their palms”. If the poem’s tack is to engage with a sense of how things could be or should be, it’s not in the usual formulation, where “these people should be talking to each other!” The focus is on the extraordinary quietness of their technologically dazzling electronic communications, and on imagining “the sound this glow would make”.
The poem itself uses sound with remarkable skill. There are the repetitions in the first couplet, “move/not moving”. “becalmed/between”: the combination of pace-slowing consonants and rhythmic jolts suggests the physical process of setting down baggage, settling awkwardly into seats, adjusting from action to stasis, giving up one’s weight to the wait. After the caesura in the first line of the second couplet, “Dead quiet” is a forceful pairing, and again produces a slowing of the tempo. But everything changes and becomes light and speedy in the third couplet, where the short “i” sounds dance like fingertips.
Now the swiftness of the exchanges is mimed in a sketchy itemisation of knowledge. Levels of significance are flattened. Economics and warfare impinge, and pass in an instant. We slip from “the price of gold” and “what’s happening in Iran” to the social-media jumble sale where “thoughts, // facts, rumours, insults zip along wires / like cash on a Baldwin Flyer”. And with that wry simile we’re suddenly back in old technology, where you could see the excitement of trade and hear the hum – or was it more of a rattle?
A little before this, the poem has taken us on an even older metaphorical ride, with its reference to the faces as “backlit” and the smartphone users “no spectators // but part of the play”. All the world’s (still) a stage it seems. This may be a short poem, but it skims over plenty of historical ground. The reference to the now-obsolete cash railway system could be read as an omen: today’s clever technology ends up in tomorrow’s museum. The more interesting analogy is the economic one. Basketloads of cash still fly around the networks, but now they fly much faster and farther and less accountably.
In the fourth stanza, very unobtrusively, the pronoun changes from “they” to “we”, revealing the speaker to be a participant in the scene. This helps sustain a non-accusatory tone as the poem moves closer to an evaluation of the behaviour it has observed.
The apparent introversion of this behaviour is emphasised by the reference to “looking out / only on our own reflections”. Perhaps it’s a simple matter of the imagined contrast of what it might it to look up from the screen and through a window. Only the bus station windows “are dark with winter”, and there is nothing to see.
The subject of “looking out on our own reflections” is “we” (grammatically following on from “we should hear a buzz”) but by the end of the poem it’s as if the windows, too, were implicated. In a faint shiver of the uncanny, suitable for a dark winter evening, the windows might themselves seem to be looking at the figures reflected from the waiting room.
Throughout the poem, we have simply continued to watch the little hushed theatre of smartphone users, lit up in the winter darkness, plying their keys in a silence that is “off-key” but not so much disturbing as surprising. Its sounds and images are memorable. The poem doesn’t need to send us a message.