For an hour and twenty minutes

he's been watching a couple

lifting and setting down a suitcase,

two sailors flirting with passers-by,

a woman with crying baby in one arm,

daughter with half-eaten sandwich

in the other. For a moment he thought

how they're family, all in this 

together. Then indifference set in.

He's nothing to them and they're nothing

to him, just faces sliding across glass 

when the big doors open.

 

The whole depot slides with them:

tall racks of magazines

in the gift shop, dusty shelves 

of model Greyhounds and dolls

with outstretched arms,

bright pinball machines, a spinning wheel 

that tells fortunes and stamps pennies 

with The Lord's Prayer, even the drivers

in the diner's corner booth, their hushed talk 

of a Porsche that hit the Tahoe Express

head-on—all dissolves

when the dispatcher announces from the rafters

San this, El that.

 

*

 

He steps up into the cool dark

of a Scenicruiser, finds a seat

in the back, watches the last passengers board.

When a stranger sits beside him,

squeezes his arm and asks his name,

the boy looks down 

at workers tossing luggage like lost souls

into the Greyhound's underbelly. Leaving the city,

 

it's the symmetry of orchards he glares at,

smudgepot flames dancing on the cool

tinted glass. Rows of oil rigs

pump out the slowly 

descending night—and now this man's

pressing his thigh, 

asking where he's from, 

where he's headed.

 

*

 

The dead were laid out 

along the side of the road

in drifts of snow. He saw them

as the drivers kept telling and retelling

their story. Indifference wavered

as he placed a napkin over his fork and spoon,

stroked the bodies lying there,

imagined the bus he's now on

plummeting the full length of a slope,

passengers falling into each other’s arms—

 

But this is his story, 

so the boy, alone,

clings to a fistful of stamped pennies

and never forgives those who trespass against him.