Day: July 4, 2021

ㅁ
10 ways of looking @ a city bus
(after W. Stevens which I just was reading)

1. A boy is kissed by his girl
@ a bus stop on Figueroa St.
By the taco stand. A bus pulls up.
And struggles away in a cloud of exhaust.

2. A child watches the red & yellow bus,
all angular, be-wheeled giant,
irrelevant to his life
He watches from the window.

3. Rural, inter-city county bus,
bound for the university
A column of eucalyptus trees flips past
College students look out at
   the lumber stacked in rows

4. 11 pm on Washington Blvd.
A man waits, stomping to stay warm
Almost dancing on the icy sidewalk
The 16A doesn't come.

5. Two yellow and brown buses
careen down Avenida Insurgentes @ 2 am
their drivers are racing.
The passengers doze, or are drunk.

6. The newspaper headline says
the buses are overcrowded.
The state orders the transit authority
   to buy more buses
one man asks "Where's the money
   going to come from?"

7. An old woman clambers onto a bus,
Somewhere along 6th Avenue - the 50's, I think.
An impatient young man flicks his burning
   cigarette into the gutter
And reaches for the handrail to climb aboard.

8. Somewhere near St.-Germaine-des-Pres
a bus disgourges its passengers
The rich, intoxicating smell of diesel fumes
Still makes me think of Paris in January.

9. Accelarating passionately
the rural bus swings into opposing traffic
To pass a donkey cart
An old woman who boarded @ the mercado
   hugs her chicken protectively.

10. Sgt. Jones was impressed, when I knew
which bus to board - I decifered the hangul.
We went to the modern art museum
South of Seoul, amid luxuriant green trees.

– a free-form poem from my past. This poem was written April 18, 1999, in a paper journal, and transcribed under that date to this blog in 2013.