Afferent, the city bus cramps to the curb and brakes
through
Solipsistic muteness
With an exhaltation startled and choking.
As the sun blazes upon the terminal's
Scraped concrete
The shelved rows of the poor men
Hear the sound die on the pavement
In a gradual dying echo.
A cigarette succumbs to the voice as
Carrion brought to life; all the tattered people
awaken;
And a man spits toward the tire of the bus,
But misses.
And as he watches his own spit vanish
From the hard crest of the world,
And silently scrapes his lunch pail against
A corner of a metallic bench as if expecting the pale
to bleed...
And hoping it would bleed...he tries to remember the
angles
He and his wife stood to project
The intermingled shadows that both
Had labeled as their marriage.
He enters the second bus:
Its coolness sedating the skin that
Overlaps his troubled mind.
His thoughts pull together
Like the light, cool flow of the air conditioning.
He feels a little pacified.
He knows the shadow's intangible depth:
Its vastness having overpowered him these months
Until he could not reach the logic that told him
To find himself outside its barriers.
As he stares out of the window
He wonders why she has left.
How could she have left without indication
When he has remained angled toward work
So that he and his wife can stay alive?
In the bus window he sees his diaphanous face--the
windows
Of the Hilton, where he has a job in maintenance,
Piercing solidly through its head. He rings the bell.
The idea of her not home, and legally annulled
From his life--her small crotch not tightened to his
desperate
Thrusts--makes him feel sick. He gets down from the
bus.
He goes to work. He suddenly knows that being in love
is not love.
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