Atlanta Bus
By William Doreski
While you aren’t looking, I board
the Atlanta bus. Cities snarl
and cough as we prowl streets littered
with capped plastic vials and hulks
of burned cars. Plywood windows
stare backwards into the dark.
Someone loved someone long ago,
claims the graffiti. I believe it
the way I believe the rivers—
Hudson, Delaware, Susquehanna.
They’ve been pouring down from the hills
so long no one should doubt them.
But you did, and that’s why I fled.
Fellow passengers chat or doze
or read blood-red paperback novels.
As the bus crosses the Potomac
with the hairless capitol dome
scorched by a hundred floodlights
I toss my wallet from the window
over the rail. Many rivers north
of here, half-asleep, you hear the splash,
but it hardly disturbs the dream-life you’ve
so adroitly self-imposed
no one has detected the scars.
Copyright © 2007 by William Doreski.