This is an Advent poem. No fooling.
RETURN 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 the 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.
[You can listen to an audio version of this poem using the little widget above the photograph.]
Wait, who was that?
I wrote this poem in — my goodness — 1997, thinking about an aspect of Advent that doesn’t get much emphasis these days. Advent invites Christians (and interested friends) to prepare for the arrival of a baby born long ago, and to celebrate his coming as God-With-Us; but we’re also preparing, in theory, for God-With-Us to return one day, and … judge the world? end time? bring about a new creation? “We await his coming in glory,” my fellow believers and I say in unison each Sunday … but when I think about how he showed up and lived among us the first time, it’s hard for me to believe that glory will be the first thing on his mind. Those people on the crosstown bus, now — hanging out with them is more his kind of glory. Or that’s what a poet imagines, anyhow.
Oh how I loved your imaginative depiction of Christ would He have appear among us today.
Whimsical descriptions that a longtime bus rider frequently saw: “Mormon twins in cheap
black suits” and “the loud guy in the smelly coat”
What a brilliant poem. The scene is so precisely crafted. I really like this poem very much, especially the humanity in it. For everybody.