June 6th 1944 was D-Day.
an ordinary Tuesday,
delightful divided into an ordinary gamut,
a potpourri of Earth-Ordinaries,
with me doing my very best job ever,
bus stop eavesdropping.
Buses are for everyone,
but ever since they taught the
city buses to kneel to the elderly
and gave them an additional limb,
an elevator for wheelchairs,
they seem more majoritized by those
who have earned
the discounted fare of senior citizenry.
two prim and rose blushed ladies await the M31,
to head uptown on York Avenue,
where the many hospitals
have elected to build edifices
side by side, to more easily share illness,
and rise far as the Babel elevators can climb.
prime material for a bus stop poet,
and sure enough, these two, mid-eighties,
I reckon, provide me rich veins of
words, matériel, to cross under the arches.
What is the proper way to put in toilet paper so it dispenses
properly, which somehow is super fascinating.
who has had their hips replaced and who passed,
because they did not.
the deterioration of bus service under the new mayor who seems always to be out of town, or late.
a few blocks before bus approached Sloan Kettering,
where one was to be scanned precautionary,
while the other was due an intravenous cocktail of poison,
the more aged of the two changed the subject extraordinarily.
do you know what day this is?
the other replied,
oh yes,
the day your older brother died upon a French beach,
the brother but eight years older than us,
the brother your adored and that I loved, even at age ten,
was to be my shy one, betrothed unto me
for seventy years my darling, we have together remembered,
even in the years that my abusive husband wrested me away
to California, and forbade my seeing your countenance,
and the second, a good man of proud Missouri stock,
poorer than an interdenominational lmouse,
who wished but could not afford our joining,
have we not always chattered on this day,
of this and that,
so you could ask as if by chance,
do you know what day this is?
this is the day
they chose to name with scarlet ****** letter,
not an A but a black and bold
D,
and redirected our lives,
its tremors and
remembrances,
its directed chances and luck of the draw, and diminishing memories,
knowing that we shall never again be separated till we have word
choice
stripped from our vocabulary.
now our stop has come so let us alight and delight
that we defeat yet again, that deathful enemy,
and even when he must win the day,
we three will be reunited in a victory,
in a victory so patiently awaited.
missed my stop by ten blocks,
and was thinking maybe
being an eavesdropping bus poet stop
was a more dangerous profession than I could handle.
7/21/17 York Ave.