Head Out of Your Ass, Pennsylvania -- Like NOW

This evening, I was riding home on the bus, and as sometimes occurs in the evening -- never in the morning -- I felt a bit too nausea-prone to try reading. This makes no sense to me, since in the morning my gorge is unstable when I so much as brush my teeth. I can eat, and all, I'm just sensitive. In the evening, though, apparently the bus shakes more or something.

Anyway, these rides when I can't read are interminable, they really are, unless one of my bus buddies is aboard, which is unfortunately rare. It's actually exceedingly rare, because I have never had more than two guaranteed bus conversation partners. No, actually, only one. And she works outside the city now. The other one is lovely and sweet and sings for a band in town that I adore but now she's almost never on the bus, and for some reason, distant acquaintance that she is, when she is around it so takes me aback that I fail to register that it's her until I'm firmly implanted on a seat several rows back and not sure whether to move forward and start a conversation or not -- what if I'm wrong? What if it's not her?

I think this happened yesterday, but it's the nature of the beast that I'm still not sure. Here's what happened: I was just hanging up an awkward phonecall as the bus pulled up in front of the USX tower, and the combination of stimuli temporarily shorted something out such that I didn't immediately move to enter the bus. The driver, fortunately was patient and evidently recognized me, because he didn't close the door. When I boarded, however, he asked, "Everything alright?" Distracted -- at that exact moment I didn't realize that I'd brainfarted and dawdled unnecessarily -- I just smiled and gave the only answer anyone could give to a bus driver posing such a query: "Yeah yeah, I'm fine," smile stretching as the words came out, and turning to head back.

Upon turning, in a seat toward the front, a fair apparition was looking straight at me, wide eyes with upturned corners shimmering, head wrapped in a crocheted hat that almost spherically contained her short hair, smiling so sweetly she might have melted rock. Again, reflex predominated; such a smile when matched to an unwavering top-of-the-eyes gaze (jesus, the eyelashes alone could ruin a vow of chastity) permits only one reaction: hold her gaze, smile back, blush, and get the hell out of those double klieg lights. Which I did.

So unsettled was I by the smile that I sat there staring at her left shoulder for five minutes, imagining she might look back, knowing she would not. Indie kid -- cute red 70's style windbreaker; big bulky herringbone skirt; black tights; trendy sneakerish flats. Not looking back. After five minutes of this, it occurred to me that this must have been her, and now she probably thought me a jackass for not lingering in the aisle to talk.

I'm not talking about what I intended to.

So anyway, bored out of my skull today and unable to read away the ride home, I scanned the ads in the brackets overhead and saw evidence of what I'd somehow forgotten was coming: a notice of service reductions and fare increases taking effect in March, pending some sort of extraordinary relief from the Commonwealth. Which, evidently, isn't going to happen, at least not in a timely fashion. We're not the only ones going down; Philadelphia's (SEPTA's) rate increases and service reductions are in the same ballpark as ours. WTF?

Lower income workers are the lifeblood of any urban community. And mass transit provides the vascular system. All the well-to-do, suburban interests who guard every penny of their swollen incomes like street urchins a crust of bread against any tax that doesn't provide a conspicuous direct benefit to themselves are going to watch their city hemorrhage and bleed out if they don't start acknowledging the importance of the service class.

You can't go cutting weekend service, raising fares without raising incomes, and so on. Sure, on paper, a $.50 fare increase doesn't seem like a lot. But if you're making $6.00 an hour and trying to raise a kid, every penny counts. We can't afford to make this community inhospitable to the very people who keep the city humming. We just can't. It takes a village. And that something hasn't been done about this already demonstrates how out of touch Harrisburg is with the needs of the shining communities at either end of the Commonwealth that represent it in the eyes of the rest of the country.

Oh sure, our buses are turned over regularly and attractive. And let's not forget our busstops, which are now glass instead of plexi, and faux-bronze instead of blatant aluminum, logo'd and newly signed. That's all nice. But what about the laid-off employees. The service cuts. The fare hike. These recent improvements, literally, represent the rearrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic. Somebody better go below and shore up the leaks before the whole thing sinks.

People need to get their shit together and right quick, too.

Glider

It's under suboptimal conditions -- leaving my eight-month-old car with my beloved Polish Hill mechanic (if you ever need a killer mechanic, as honest as the day is long, drop me a line) -- that I find myself on Bigelow Boulevard this morning walking on the crumbled downhill sidewalk toward downtown to the next 77A/B/C bus stop, below the second pedestrian overpass from the Bloomfield Bridge. The cacophany of high-speed traffic speeding by on my left is enough to chew up what ration I have of early-morning tolerance; by the time the angry blat of an engine-braking rig subsides, I'm scaling the chainlink fence to my right and keening skyward in a voice that only slowly comes back to me as a lull in the traffic follows a change in the traffic signal.

Embarrassed, I unhook the fingers of my right hand, move it down to my hip where I thread it back through the links and begin the process of returning myself to the sidewalk, checking over my shoulder to be sure that my bus isn't just around the bend. I'll run to get to the stop in time if I have to, congestion and all, and I'll climb aboard blue-faced and winded with a smile, anything to get away from the incessant rush of traffic speeding toward downtown, which hastens to arrive there it will inevitably start wishing it could go back the other way. I know these people. I know myself.

There's no bus in sight.

I resume my modest progress toward the second footbridge, ears ringing and heart pounding, and chastise myself for not remembering that I could have taken an alternate foot route that would have shielded me from Bigelow until I was just downhill from my stop. But I'm out of practice; whereas my last car had me at the shop every three or four months, it seemed, I'm spoiled now, unaccustomed to a car that starts and runs and seems to enjoy his life a great deal (yes, "his" -- this weekend, after he put up a hell of a fight under adverse conditions, I named him Luther, a strong name he fully earned) . I fancy myself the reason, but he seems a car designed to have fun, so he probably would enjoy himself with anyone who would let him run. Of course, very few people, even among those inclined to pay the premium money for a race-tuned sports-compact, would run him like I do. But then he doesn't know that. It's so rare that any of us recognize our own good fortune.

Anyway, enough with the personified car. He -- it, after all, is just a car.

So back to Bigelow: I'm walking toward the bus stop in the morning fog that slowly lifts like a stage curtain, trying in vain to block out the racket of passing vehicles, looking over my shoulder every so often to confirm that the bus has not yet rounded the bend, and that a tractor trailer isn't bearing down on me intent on tossing aside the thin concrete barriers (which I imagine wouldn't protect me from so much as a Range Rover moving at moderate speed) in lethal pursuit, and trying to avoid puddles that will force water through the porous leather soles of my rain-inappropriate italian shoes. (I simply will not wear galoshes. I've come to prefer the consequences of my stubborness to what I might gain by changing my mind. In my humble opinion, there's only one good reason to wear "rubbers.")

To my right, as I near my objective, a few sad houses slouch on their knees against the sidewalk, benumbed and benighted with soot and road grime, eyes slit in mockery of sleep must elude them like water eludes Tantalus. Unlike so many houses dotting thoroughfares in well-off parts of the country, these houses have no shield against the frenzied back and forth sinewaves of traffic to and from downtown, no armor except their grimy vinyl siding, their bloodstreams the povery-stricken, equally set-upon families that choose to live there, in houses they surely must have selected in full knowledge of what they were getting into, as I imagine Bigelow is older than the number just about any ordinary family's eldest members' house-buying years.

And so this does happen. People live in trailers in tornado alley. They build and restore and rerestore ramshackle cottages on floodplains. People live in broken down homes because they have no choice. They rent, because they need three bedrooms for their children but can't afford even to think about owning; or they own for similar reasons but for their good fortune in somehow cobbling together enough money at one time to secure a mortgage. Indeed, nothing should be more self-evident to me, in this particular neighborhood, on the ribbon of dilapidated pavement that separates this end of the Hill District from Polish Hill, each neighborhood comprised in significant proportion of houses I can't begin to imagine living in, virtually all of which are called home by some handful of people, a family or a young working-class couple, or perhaps an heir who took the property when her last parent died because she didn't know what else to do. There's nothing extraordinary about this.

But the porches -- they're what get me. These porches, narrow, painted in gray peeling away to reveal aqua peeling away to reveal seafoam, sided in vinyl and viewed through a sliding window far smaller than the original window in that opening must have been. Porches of plywood and clapboard and poured concrete riddled with injuries like giant bites that reveal it's dry-rotten entrails of gravel and dust, which bleed into dusty cones on the sloped and sagging floors. And on one of these porches, an old steel chair, rustoleum'd within an inch of its asphyxiating life, preserved in its misery, forlorn in one corner of a porch. On the next porch, a glider, its plywood platform exposed by the absence of cushions, perhaps taken in for the winter, which thought merely reinforces the suggestion prompted by these two unlikely pieces of furniture: that people actually sit on these porches for recreational purposes.

Do these houses lack back porches or decks that look down into the valley from a vantage shielded by the house from the worst of the traffic noise? I'd rather play Boggle in the basement with a pre-literate buffoon than so much as smoke a cigarette on any of these porches, where for all the CO one probably inhales smoking seems redundant. The thought of trying to sleep behind one of the low-enough-to-touch second-floor windows, even when closed, gives me chills. And my stomach turns at the thought of the exhaust stench the room would collect were the window left open for any significant period of time, as evidenced by the blackening residue in the corners of these homes' siding and splintered and peeling porch supports and everywhere else in sight.

At the busstop, I'm restive. I can't stand still. I move to the lee of the pedestrian overpass but then I can't see my bus's approach (soon, please be soon). I move to the other side of the stairs, and step back away from the road, but the noise appears to rebound from the concrete beside me in a reverberating process that's more horrifying than walking down the side of the road was. I pace back and forth in a futile lowercase t, resigning myself to my discomfort, wondering what it would be like to try to have a friendly conversation as I walked by one of those porches if someone were sitting there. A conversation in which "excuse me?" and "what" mortar together the bricks of whatever smalltalk we might muster before surrendering to the impossibility of sharing ideas under such adverse circumstances.

And this -- all of this: this is somebody's morning symphony. His cup of joe. Her orange juice and newspaper (delivered to the downhill side of the house, ostensibly, though the thought of a maverick paper boy racing down Bigelow Boulevard is not without its charm). Someone's communion with humanity each day. And it could be mine, had things gone differently. It still could be; I assume nothing.

And I count my blessings.

Often.

Sonata

I.

In the brittle chill the brilliant sun
sings in radiation's tongue
of morning and winter.

Unshoveled snow ossified into
undulating perfidious ripples;
feet skitter perilously seeking purchase.

Friendship Park, through salt-stained Plexiglas:
a moonscape of foot-shaped craters
rimed in metamorphic crags,

five thousand crunching footfalls --
five thousand strophes unrequited --
etched on unlined parchment,

score an inchoate symphony,
the crescendi and diminuendi of which
reach skyward then drift.

A child in quilted down,
hatted and scarved and mittened,
chinned down against the wind's lechery,

leans into his passage
like a conductor his orchestra,
studied in his mute adamance,

attuned to his vain endeavor:
to nurse from each note its frigid beauty
to find in a stagger its dance.

II.

Pressed into stoops' sun-lee corners
upset pyramids of ice-rimmed snow
lay neatly in the shape of their shade.

House after house thus adorned
with winter's diamond jewelry,
their recessed pointing limn their beauty

like symmetrical grooves a grande dame's visage
against the glow of her glistening eyes,
her gown's shimmering lyric,

the caternary elegance
of pearls to flatter
its plunging decolletage:

curves implicit in curves
complicit in curves dancing circles
around Euclidian formality.

III.

In chaos a suggestion of order,
in winter a whisper of spring.

[1/28/05, 11:08 AM (as Wave Equations) - 1/29/05, 7:11 PM]

PAT Still Life #2 (501)

-- wide brown eyes like touch transubstantiated,
a finger tangential across a sandy chin
sliding credulously down an overcoat lapel;
brown hair color of fall,
an autumn cataract over a plastic ledge
blue like electricity --
where is the neck? the ears?
they hide but lurk predatory like memory --

-- youth's frivolity on stage
trading ringtones and gossip in voices umodulated,
an ostentatious display of indifference
to the high school refugees
whose memories falter, failing
to recall childhood's cadence,
its contrapuntal march from the old(er),
a colloquy of studied slouches and sighs --

-- unfolding herself from her seat
a jacknife opening to its task
eyes returning home up lapel over chin
and away forward leaving a wake
of glowing warmth in a rippling V --
all in tan like Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
(Stevens' verse circling in rehearsal
for the lap it will turn all evening having now begun)
hair swinging like an earthquake
and a parting glance like a prod of inscrutable origin
or intent --

-- the teens giggle and mock and maunder gum popping
while minutiae aggregate and gather
to spill out on this page --

[revised, 1/27/05, 12:25PM]

PAT Still Life #1 (54C)

Old-man breath of hops and doom swirls.

Charon, peroxide blonde, implores a coltish teen to clear a bench;
she complies, the diffident surrender of youth's sunset
deferred by freedom pledged but undelivered,
clumsy knocking limbs and tangled clothing knots,
two steps across the aisle to another seat
where pride stiffens her posture.

Sighing, the bus stoops to embark its fare,
a short mustachioed man manacled at the forearms
shambling aboard surrendering coin sheepishly
slumping against the vacant seat
crutches dangling and clatter to an uneasy rest
on the floor slanting askew in our box of light.

Colt's skin too fair for the cold,
eyes too big for their sockets
too pretty for the world
(held in by no more than lumped eyeliner
inexpertly applied),
legs too long to fold,
grudging innocence unbetrayed
by a gleaming septum ring;
she locks eyes with her twin in the opposite window
and feigns blindness, autohypnosis.

Beer Breath cattle grunts and presses his knee to mine;
I shift and watch the night in warped miniature
unfold through the thick of his bifocals and the windshield's thin.

The chime, a shorter girl presses forward
thin lips wildflower pretty,
body awkward in jeans less snug than the mode,
bookbag like a field stone slung low on her back;
leaning forward like a mule to the yoke
she enters the night.

[revised, 1/19/05, 11:59 PM]

Pennywise

This morning I caught a later bus than I prefer to, and it was crowded enough that I was tapped standee number 2. A dubious distinction, I shuffled toward the well by the rear door, where standee number 1 had already assumed the most desirable standing position, leaning up against the divider one step into the well. It was one of those buses that teaches an object lesson about poor use of space, the kind with one-person seating down the right side of the front half of the bus, not in a bench but in individual, forward-facing seats. This leaves, of course, a very wide aisle, but one that has outthought itself; even a man of average height, standing in the middle of this space, will barely be able to reach either rail. It's a silly layout, is the point. Unless of course you have the good fortune to score one of the single seats -- then it seems like a pretty cool idea.

I took up my social-convention-dictated position just in front of the well, deep enough down the aisle to permit a dozen or so standees to fill in between me and the front of the bus, which experience told me would be sufficient for our ride downtown. To ward off the terrible cold, I wore a heavy thriftstore find I adore: heavy herringbone, shiny satin lining, sumptuous polyester fur collar. So weighty is it, in fact, that I found it a strain to keep my arm over my head in order to hold the rail (another inconvenience one avoids if he manages to secure a position in the rear doorway).

Resigning myself to the inconvenience, to the loss of reading time, I began looking around for something to pass the time, an entertainment, a phenomenon. What I sought, I soon discovered, was literally right under my nose, where an androgynous, rumpled figure with knobby knuckles rummaged in a leather satchel. The satchel revealed itself to be a purse, the figure a broken-down and elderly woman, and my perspective was perfect: from my natural stance, I could see everything she was doing but could not see her face, which meant she couldn't see mine.

She first caught my attention when I noticed her fiddling clumsily with a business reply envelope reinforced with tape, and adorned by several illegible and misaligned ballpoint pen scribbles in blue with visible stutters in the longer lines where the ball malfunctioned or the pen simply lifted up, perhaps where an irregular surface created on the surface of the envelope a relief that made it difficult to write evenly. The envelope was folded over neatly and secured by a paperclip so large it nearly reached from the envelope's top to its bottom. Awkwardly, the skin of her fingers bunching like moleskin along its labyrinthine fissures in which one might imagine something were etched were it not such a cliche, she pulled at the paperclip once, twice, and a third time in vain. Pausing, redoubling her effort, she succeeded on the fourth attempt, and I could feel her elementary satisfaction, or was it relief, at finally unsealing the vessel.

The paperclip removed and tucked under a finger in a practiced and economical gesture that belied the difficulty the other manual task had entailed, she held the envelope in her left hand while her right worked to spread the top wide. Again, several attempts were required before finally she opened the envelope as wide as it allowed, her anticipation palpable like an eddy of warmth in the drafty bus. Inside were several slips of paper, one of which she removed and examined, some sort of coupon.

Her coat was a turquoise ski coat of the inexpensive sort that will stand up to neither cold nor water. On its left breast, a rectangular button asserted her loyalty to the Black and Gold. Under her purse, her legs hid within oversized black denim, the knees faded to share their pale, sickly grey with the violated snow clotted against the berm of Liberty Avenue. I couldn't see her face, her choice of headwear, not without risking her self-consciousness. I was more interested in the purse than her face in any case.

Satisfied with whatever she had accomplished in her first examination (or, more probalby, the first of her examinations to which I'd played witness), she flipped back the brown flap of her purse. The flap itself appeared to be stuffed with a stack of papers the same dimension as 5X8 index cards. Inside, however, was where the real mystery lay. There, in orderly rows like patient files, like multiple contest entries awaiting a lick and a prayer, were dozens, scores of envelopes much the same as the one she had just opened, disgorged, and restored to its contents and what appeared to be a carefully selected space in the stack of similar envelopes: although no envelope revealed anything like a taxonomic denotation, she nevertheless seemed, almost instinctually, to understand where each one belonged.

Envelope sealed and restored, she began rifling through the others, her fingers furtively standing briefly on the edge of each before mincing along in a precarious ballet, one way and then the other, until finally she found what she was looking for. Withdrawing it, and again fumbling with the paperclip, she opened the envelope to reveal a clutter of the paper coupons Giant Eagle's registers spit at you in a for-profit effort to goad you into buying Linda McCartney's veggie burgers next time. She appeared to look at one, briefly, as though to determine whether its expiration had passed. Evidently the coupons would live another day. This time, when she attempted to reclose the envelope with the paperclip, she struggled mightily. This envelope, moreso than the other, had the dull flimsiness of paper that has been crumpled and smoothed, crumpled and smoothed, breathed upon and handled entirely too many times. After a pause, an examination, and some careful tactile exploration of the offendingly weak areas at the envelope's mouth, she managed to replace the paper clip and return the envelope to its designated place among the others.

The last envelope I saw her withdraw as we neared downtown was the most cryptic. Unlike the others, this one had a legible phrase slurred in drunken loops next to the business reply address: "New Coupons." Inside, only one Giant Eagle coupon was contained. She quickly replaced it, her suddenly anxious movements suggesting that her head might be swiveling around, her wattle swinging beneath her chin, in an effort to determine whether she was being watched. But she couldn't see my face, nor I hers.