Fleda Brown Jackson: Bus stop

She is scratching her foot

against the steel leg of the bus seat,

imagining herself a woman free on the road,

cornfield after cornfield.

She is seventeen and returning to the town

her father's failure took her from,

returning to her old boyfriend

to tie things up so tightly

a whole lifetime cannot untie them.

She pictures him encased in his Buick

like a dark spool, his mind turning over

and over, winding her toward him.

After dark, though, she lets her head droop

against the soldier from Chicago

on his way to Ft. Chaffee. He

and his friends speak softly, the click

and mumble of their voices naming

guns and machines while she leans on his

khaki, moves on out with the infantry,

faces the open-mouthed cannon

which is only the neon flash

of the Iron Skillet bus stop in Centralia,

where she and the soldier are sitting

on stools, smoking and talking over

their separate futures as if the talk

were already betrayal,

her heart lurching awfully easily

into this happiness of riders, his pale mouth

in the center. She hunkers

in his mouth to get near her heart.

Out there someone looks up--a small, wild

dishevelment. It is her reflection

in the bus window. She is back

on the bus, is she? All right, then.

She curls up alone on a seat, stuck with

her original plan, too dangerous

a person for anything else.

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Nov 1995
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved