Wake
Above the carriageway
a black plastic sheet glides like a ray,
becomes for a blink, the sun’s eyelid.
For a mile or more, cellophane
twists in hard-shoulder turbulence,
snags roadside hawthorn. I’m closing in
on this blinding vision; a white flatbed
with a cargo of sun-blazed ribbons,
gossamer shreds lost in slipstream,
a polymer shoal, swimming
in the trees, each sheer or tinted piece
sure to last millennium. The driver
is not Aruna, charioteer of the sun
but a red bearded twenty-something
with his foot to the floor;
he’s deaf to my horn, blind
to my gestures, elbow on the sill
as his load becomes light.
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