Public transit

Aboard the train, the usual thing:
a conversation overheard,
then eavesdropped on: two friends
discussing an absent third,

their heads ashake with sympathy,
in shared concern their voices hushed;
so that I caught, for all my strain,
no more than snatches as we rushed

downtown. At first one word, divorce ,
its steely second syllable
landing like a guillotine,
alone cut through the shrill

disharmony of track and wheel;
but then during a smoother stretch
whole phrases reached my ear:
it seems hed chanced uponpoor wretch!

his wife in bed with someone else
and that his daughter has Tourettes .
And there I was, attending to
the woes of a man Id never met,

whose very name I failed to learn;
yet all the while half-thinking of
my eight-months-pregnant wife, and how
the vulnerabilities of love

would soon, for me, be doubled;
and wondering whether I,
when sorrows come (as Claudius says)
no longer single spies

but in ruinous battalions,
can possibly withstand their force;
and whether anyone, in fact,
dare doubt that in due course

theyll be the sad case talked about,
their life careering off the rails:
the one regarding whom such friends
as these, in view of his travails,

will some day ask quite hopelessly
this last bit gleaned before we all
stand up, get off, disperse
Who can catch him if he falls? .

Your donation sustains our efforts to inspire joyous rediscoveries.

Ben Downing's Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross was published in 2013 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Topics: Poetry

Download