seen from a Greyhound bus - mute aisles
of merchandise the sole inhabitants
of the half-darkened Five and Ten,
the tables of the single lit cafe awash
with unarticulated pathos, the surface membrane
of the inadvertently transparent instant
when no one is looking: outside town
the barns, their red gone dark with sundown,
withhold the shudder of a warped terrain -
the castle rocks above, tree-clogged ravines
already submarine with nightfall, flocks
(like dark sheep) of toehold junipers,
the lucent arms of birches: purity
without a mirror, other than a mind bound
elsewhere, to tell it how it looks.
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by Amy Clampitt, 1985
