On the bus, today, ...
... I saw fields green with the young spring barley.
... I saw a man kneeling beside the tollway next to his SUV, which had a flat tire.
... I saw a banner with a Japanese flag and the words (in English): "Don't give up, Japan."
... I saw a motel designed to look like a Russian Orthodox Church.
... I saw a single broad patch of snow on a hillside of brown grass, near Gongju.
... I saw a shed on fire, in a field, with a great billowing cloud of white smoke.
... I heard "Aguas de março" sung by Elis Regina and Antonio Carlos Jobim, on my mp3 player.
... I saw a cow sleeping in some dirt.
... I saw a reproduction of a watercolor painting of Paris' St.-Germain Square on the wall over a urinal at a tollway rest area.
... I heard grumpy old people with thick Jeolla accents pronouncing Yeonggwang as Yeom-gang.
... I saw a tall young man with tight jeans and shiny purple combat boots yelling into a cellphone and dropping his iced coffee onto the pavement.
... I heard Talking Heads' "Found a Job" on my mp3 player.
... I saw brick farm houses with solar panels on their flat roofs.
... I read 50 pages of Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore.
... I saw many, many pine trees dancing under the sky, their roots sunk in the red-gold earth, looking like ink-drawings.
... I heard The Cure's cover of David Bowie's "Young Americans" on my mp3 player.
... I saw tiny villages packed up into narrow valleys, limned with leafless trees, where all the houses had blue tile roofs.
... I saw an angry-looking euro-dude with Miami Vice sunglasses, spitting onto the sidewalk like a Korean.
... I saw a giant statue of a squirrel.
... I ate something vaguely resembling tater-tots, with a spicy sauce.
... I saw a bridge over the tollway that had trees planted on it.
... I saw hundreds of plastic greenhouses, filled with hothouse vegetables growing, looking like large worms swimming in formation through the still wintery fields.
... I heard Juanes' "Fijate bien" on my mp3 player.
... I saw families having picnics at the graves of their ancestors at random locations on hillsides alongside the tollway, and there were many children hopping happily, too.
... I saw a crow perched on the sign that indicated the Yeonggwang County line. I was almost home.
[this poem is a "back-post" added 2011-04-24, copied from my paper journal. I added the embedded youbube videos because the poem needed a sound-track. A scan of a picture from the paper journal page added 2013-06-14.]
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