Letters to Glasgow

Heading north is a leap of the heart. 
On the map on the phone, the blue dot
is a pulse that crosses the border.

Clouds swing open over the hills
and train chases river, races
after it like a riever,

like a long-distance runner, 
breathing hard into the wind
with its flag of light flying behind.

Between home and elsewhere,
between in here and out there,
one journey is layered over the other,

one time on another. Meeting a stranger
on a train, getting to know them better,
is like opening an unexpected letter. 

That's me on the garden, and that...I can't tell
if it's Graham or Brian...that's the two of us sat there.
My daughter said, Look at you posing. 

In here is a steady hush and a shoosh
that carries her back to the songs she sang
when she was young. She floats

and rocks and someone talks out of the past.
The hum of the train becomes the voice
of her mother, then deepens to be

the voice of her lover so she dreams him back
in the jacket she liked, to share half a sandwich,
tea with milk and one sugar.

his arm brushing hers, and then he will tell her
he went to Ecclefechan before he met her.
The presence of him is the whoosh of wheels

and she is glad he came back for a while.
For a while, in her sleep, she smiles.
The train is a memory-keeper, it carries

something alive, like the words in a letter,
not gathering dust but held in trust.
This is how love moves on and survives. 

In the window, her life looks back
at the man on the phone, and reflects his own.
The future comes in and puts down its bags.

Down the carriage, a clicking and pecking
at keyboards, half-heard, half-knowing,
tossed away in the coming and going

like all the other used-up things,
the cardboard wrap, the cellophane,
paper napkins, time-pass, stifled

yawn. The rubbish collector gathers it in,
stopping for breath in the vestibule,
his back to the door, feeling the change

in the sound, the different drumming,
the slip and shiver of in-between
and far below, the long embrace

of wheel and rail. The blue dot is still speeding,
over the screen, sheep are fast
and houses are quicker, going over the edge

with all the lost things at the butt-end of town
where the young fizzle out against walls
sprayed with words in black and red

and the wires are dancing
with the whole of the sky,
meeting and parting, saying goodbye.

We are now approaching, we are now approaching

over the Clyde where the great ships were born,
over the water, a ghostly foghorn,
over the bridge to the city they come,

some of them visiting, some returning.
They take up their baggage and their belongings,
they take up their longings

and the train brings them in to Glasgow Central,
the tall windows, the glass bridge,
the Heilanman's Umbrella lit

to gather them in, 
as if someone has waited for them too long,
as if they are love letters, delivered home.