Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Must really like the bus

Butte, Montana

The next Greyhound driver is missing in action
And I’m stuck in the Butte station again
Inside you can buy fruit salad for 2.99 or watch television
Outside there is real grass
Where last time I saw loose dogs play tug-o-war with someone’s lost Mountain Dew
Today I sit at the gray picnic tables
Provided as if any of the people I have seen from Pittsburgh to Great Falls
Travel with a full picnic basket and the all the time to settle down in Butte

At the table are mostly Montanans who haven’t met before
A gray-haired, plump woman in pink seems pleased with herself
She tells stories of her hometown somewhere North
That she knows we’re so eager to hear
And the man beside her, a stranger, listens with such a look
That I want to take his photo, or have the hands to capture him in blue pen or black pencil
He is lovely and gray, like he’s worked hard all his life but kept his temper
He has a Styrofoam cup of coffee, that should taste good but certainly doesn’t
A cigarette is either in his left hand, or I’ve put it there afterwards
He’s handsome like a different Lee Harvey Oswald or my dead Grandfather
Who gave three quarters of his life for the pipes of Anaconda Copper
And this man at my table
Could have made pancakes on a Sunday morning for my mother
Could have told my Aunt Julie, as the oldest girl, that he was so sorry
He just couldn’t say those things, you know he loved her, though
Of course he loved her

But this man is less complicated than my mother half-orphaned at 12
He is just the momentary falling in love with a kind face
With listening to a well-meaning, tactless stranger
With two days of bus stations, their people inside
With the moment the sky opens up, somewhere past Wisconsin
The way it peels away the sides and tops and just blossoms
And with my Greyhound bus, God bless the late driver
Who is putting one more moment between home and me

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