The People on the Bus Go Up and Down

Poems of Public Transit, Part 1 of ???

I’ve never owned a car. My driver’s license expired when I was in my early twenties, and I never renewed it. I live in a city with a transit system that is imperfect, routinely reviled, and actually pretty impressive. I’ve been riding the bus almost every day for years … with my eyes and ears open, and a notebook in my bag.

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Incident

The madman on the outbound bus
turns a woman into newspaper. Excuse me,
he says loudly to her reading
on the plastic bench behind him, since
we'll never meet again may I ask you
a personal question? and first
her eyes are newspaper, then
her ears and her tiny smile,
her fingerprints are newsprint and it spreads
past wrists, down ankles, until
if the madman struck a match to light
a cigarette (which is of course forbidden
on the outbound bus) the woman would ignite
in a bonfire of screaming headlines.

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Late Night on the #5 Bus

The dark-haired young man
in a seat facing the aisle
holds open on his lap
a folio-size genetics textbook,
line after line highlighted in purple.

It is May, university finals season.
The young man's eyes are rumpled as his shirt.
It's a day or two since he shaved.
He cradles his heavy text the way a monk 
would tend his Book of Hours.

As the bus crosses Divisadero,
he angles his body up and flat to reach
into the pocket of his jeans
and pulls out a handful of lavender,
fresh this morning, crumpled now.

Then he settles back into his seat
and his purple-stained devotions,
while in the margin his tired fingers curve
around the pungent wilted petals, as if around
a candle, or the relic of a saint.

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“Incident” may be the first bus-poem I ever wrote — and yes, I know, the newspaper dates it a bit, and oh well. It falls into the first of two categories (which I’ve just this minute made up) of stories told in bus-poems: Contact stories, and Bubble stories. Contacts between strangers on a bus can be anything from casual to catastrophic; in between you have the tense ones, the funny ones, and a few that are just odd. I wish I could remember what happened next in the story that “Incident” relates; I’m guessing that the man in an altered state got distracted, or decided to get off the bus. The real climax of the story, for this observer, was watching the woman become entirely one with the newspaper she was gripping, and feeling that grip and brittle stillness in my own muscles and skin.

“Late Night on the #5 Bus” is a perfect example of a Bubble story. Lots of people ride the bus in their own private bubble — staring out the window or at their phone, closing their eyes, reading a book or a magazine, creating a tiny space around themselves in which they can go on living their private life in public. Most bubble-behavior is unremarkable; every now and then, though, if you keep watching the bubbles, you see someone behaving in a quietly extraordinary way. Why has a college kid got a pocket full of lavender? Why is he out so late with his textbook and his flowers? On the bus you don’t get the back-story, you get the moment. Sometimes the moment brings a poem with it.