POEM

In Kennedy Plaza on the tight strip allowed riders we flock tightly with clipped wings till the bus too weary to sweep pulls in. We load in, disparate ammo in a ramshackle gun. Relegated to seats we cup toward or away from each other, wait for the man to fire his engine at the moment the schedule dictates. A man and a woman, parentheses in the handicapped seat, Price Rite bags on their laps, at their feet, parentheses too, as is the man’s breathing tube, another lip above his upper lip. I listen to a woman’s voice, see the shoe of a man on my left: I'm going to work! That's what matters, to have a job. Have to have a place to go. Even if it a holiday I'm going in. But—getting a kick out of warning—I’m calling in on you some day! At the VA hospital he jumps off, he’s smiling, looking back, I’ll call in on you! Before a move is made there is before and before, before a stop is called a tension, a lean, a lift. Then the maximal heave and lurch, in the jostle of the bus, the grapple for the bags, the prize, what’s carried home—and an old man, slender, maybe Indian, leans from his seat across the aisle, peeling away from the papers he is reading I see the brown envelope on the seat, takes the bags, moves swiftly to the door, steps down, sets them on the kerb will he get on again in time, lets the heaving couple—kings—squeeze down. From the knot shuffling to exit Someone forgot his papers (a man’s voice) and I (instantly) He’s coming back! And the woman beside me (instantly) He’s coming back! And he comes back into silence—that moment past—followed by a man on a crutch who swings his sausage bag into the luggage rack just then obscured by two girls who stand propped, African, the closer so relaxed it takes a while to realize how consummate her beauty is. You talk about it later. Now—will the girls help with the bag when the time comes? He gestures so they do and he hops down, moving surely off, crutch and bag, toward the laundromat.