104 Bus Uptown


How bad can it be,
our dear wacky New York City,
when the first twelve lines
of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
blink down at me
from a poster on this bus
brought to us
courtesy of the MTA
and the Poetry Society of America
(of which, incredibly, I am a member!)
and, to its right, above the rear door,
another poster: Charles Reznikoff’s little poem
about how “the lights go out—”
in the subway
“but are on again in a moment,”
a poem I will be teaching to my students
in a few weeks’ time.
And perched in the center back seat
(she got on at Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street),
sitting all alone, as if on a little stage
lit by the bus-window daylight of midtown Manhattan,
the beautiful actress Beverly D’Angelo,
whom I can’t bring myself to ask
if she is Beverly D’Angelo, except that I
recognize the perfection of her charming over-bite
as she chews gum like mad over wild blue eyes agog,
behaving as if she’s never sat on a bus before
or as if she expects a passenger to leap up
at any moment and cry, “Action!,”
with the cameras rolling like the eyes in my head
as I turn now and again to look at her
in her white jacket and skirt that don’t quite
match, a silk turquoise blouse that
color-keys her enormous eyes
(which just got off with the rest of her
at 57th and Eighth), and I’m lucky
enough to have been handed this
piece of paper twenty minutes ago
by someone on the street who must be
a secret agent for poetry, though it seems
to be merely an advertisement flyer
for 45th Street Photo, on the back of which
I’ve just written this poem

-"104 Bus Uptown" first appeared in Where X Marks the Spot (Hanging Loose Press, 2006)