Public Transportation
I walk toward the bus-stop, avoid making eye-contact with a man in a rumpled white shirt who carries a white plastic bag out of which hangs the leg of a child's pair of pants. “Open for business,” he calls and watches me climb aboard the Number 1, taking a seat next to the blonde who looks as if she had her hair “done up” for something.
Somewhere in the city a man who says he loves me drives a borrowed pick-up hauling plumbing supplies. He sets up house. Some days he buys my groceries, some days he curses me, some days he lies.
Always be honest, especially with yourself, my father said. Always know exactly how much you are willing to give up. My father worked as a claims adjuster for an insurance company, estimating dollar amounts for loss of limb and motor ability, surveying the exact spot on the gymnasium floor where a boy became paraplegic. My father understood the fragile braid of a spinal cord. He said never negotiate from a position of weakness.
My father was born into a world that could not see itself, that had no image for the cream-in-coffee swirl of weather systems, no notion of holes in an ozone veil, or the temperamental flare of suns.
Some people move like dull-edged storms without lightening without warning. Some people only speak after they have walked past you.
My father rode the trolley in Newark, New Jersey. My father took the PATH train. A ride on an empty bus can be a metaphor for a dream narration. I take what the window gives me. Here a gas pump, wash of paint over the crosswalk; here a stop sign. A wash of clouds blows east from the Pacific, until the pecan leaves bend like wings over a branch of spine, half-held by sky. I want a different kind of weather or a new way to move through it as switch, as bundle.
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