The Advent poem about that guy on the bus

"A slow ride, but he seemed in no hurry...."

Photo by Ryan Brooklyn on Unsplash

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This poem appeared here (as Substack is diligent to remind me) around this time last year. Here it is again, dedicated to my friend Barbara, who likes it best of all my poems. I like it too, as a riff on the B-side of Advent, if you will — not the wait for a baby to be born, but the wait for Somebody to come back and wrap things up or possibly start something new. That long-anticipated comeback gets imagined in all sorts of ways; having soaked up the stories about how Somebody went to work when he was here the first time, I’m less likely to picture crowns and clouds of glory and more likely to see him starting local and person-to-person.

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RETURN                                                                      1997


It’s true, he’s back. I saw him 
yesterday, on the crosstown bus. Not so much 
like the pictures; he’d shaved (a day or two ago 
at least) and pulled his hair back with 
a rubber band -- ratty Giants sweatshirt,
old Levis, and sandals that he could
have worn the last time, I guess. The face
was the same, though -- you knew it when
you watched him laughing with the boombox kids
in the back seat, flirting with a solemn baby
until its mother’s thin brown cheeks shone pink;
chatting up the Mormon twins who cruised 
the aisle in cheap black suits and earnest smiles,
shaking hands again with the loud guy
in the smelly coat, answering his random questions
as if they mattered; gazing back at a manicured man
wrapped in the Wall Street Journal, until
the manicured stare crumpled like newsprint, smudged  
into a little-boy grin. A slow ride, but he seemed
in no hurry -- I heard him ask the driver
where to transfer for the veteran’s hospital,
and when he pulled the cord and swung 
down the steps and out the opening door,
the boombox kids followed him 
and the guy in the smelly coat
and the man with the Wall Street Journal.
The baby started crying
the Mormon twins wiped their noses
and for a minute all of us looked at each other
the way you never do on the crosstown bus,
searching hard in her face my face your face
for something we had seen in his.

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