Dave Bonta's "Crossing Wales" starts from a small physical awkwardness: the speaker sits facing backwards on a train, travelling forward with eyes fixed on what is being left behind. The rest of the poem grows from that position. It is about how a journey splits our attention between the distance we are losing and the nearby thing we haven't noticed, and about arriving somewhere whose name we can't yet say.
The opening simile, "like a waxing moon," is odd and rich. A waxing moon is swelling toward fullness, and the "hidden wheel / of my belly a little wobbly" suggests a round, heavy body. Judging by the imagery, the speaker may be pregnant, though the poem never says so. The word "wheel" does triple duty: the moon's disc, the curve of a belly, and the train wheels turning out of sight under the floor. Body, moon and machine move together, and the faint wobble gives the sentence a gentle, comic unsteadiness.
Then comes the landscape: "I watch the hills pile up, blueing / as the gulf between us grows." "Pile up" makes the hills heap behind the train like luggage, and "blueing" catches the way distance drains colour from a hillside. "Gulf" turns that measurable distance into something close to feeling, and the "us" is left ambiguous. Is it the speaker and the land, or the speaker and someone else? The question that follows, "Who knows when or if I'll pass / this way again?", is plainspoken, almost offhand, which makes the sense of passing through sound more honest.
The turn arrives on a dangling "And then," so the reader waits for the shift just as the speaker's eyes do. "The close-at-hand" is itself a little clump of hyphenated nearness. The discovery is that the speaker has been "staring straight through / the reflection of a girl / who faces forward." The window shows two things at once, the world outside and a figure laid over it. The girl is the speaker's opposite. She faces the way the train is going, while the speaker faces the way it has come. She is "pale / & attentive," and her "hair the color / of autumn fields" describes her in the terms of the landscape she is reflected against. The poem doesn't say who she is. She may be simply another passenger, but the pairing of backward and forward, longing and attention, invites us to read her as a kind of counterweight.
The form is a single unbroken stanza of free verse, with no regular metre and almost no rhyme. "Grows" and "knows," a line apart, are a rare chime, and it gives that moment of wondering a faint finality. Lines are short, and the enjambments rock the reader like carriages. The break in "We slow / down" makes the sentence itself decelerate. Twice the poem uses an ampersand ("pale & attentive," "around us & stops, & the doors"), which gives the lines a hurried, jotted-down look, as if observed on the move.
The arrival is wonderfully strange: "A station platform assembles itself / around us & stops." Because the speaker faces backwards, the place seems to come to her, built in pieces like a stage set, and the verb "assembles" makes the world do the travelling. The doors "slide open," and the poem ends on a question: "What place is this / whose name requires two / clearings of the throat?" Given the title, the joke is presumably about the sounds of a Welsh place name, an inference rather than something the poem states. The line break leaves "two" hanging, as though the speaker is bracing for the effort. The body returns here, the belly of the opening now answered by the throat, so that arriving means taking a place in physically, not just reading its sign.
The poem is slight in scale but sharp in what it notices. It dramatizes a very ordinary kind of blindness, looking so hard at what is far away that we miss the person reflected in front of us. It ends not with a lesson but with humour and a question, matching the "Who knows?" of the opening. The speaker has spent the journey looking back, and in the last lines she is turned, awkwardly and a little amused, to face something new.