MBTA Bus Poems By Liam Day Callie Crossley Show April 2012
#10 – Panopticon Some routes cross the city, some circumvent it; some, like blood, work from its limbs to the heart and back again – from City Point at the gate to the inner harbor to Copley Square in the shadow of the Hancock Tower, the slab of blue glass redolent of a tombstone. From so many places in my life, so many places surrounding the city like an army in siege – Chelsea, Somerville, West Roxbury, the top floor of the Victorian in Dorchester converted to a condo during the bubble before the bubble that just burst, leaving us, like a patch of floating garbage, underwater on a mortgage we secured with almost nothing down – I’ve watched its panels catch the sun’s last light. Mornings, I hop the bus at Andrew, ride it for a short stretch over the highway, it too a desiccated vein to the city’s moldering heart. But biology this isn’t. The city sucks from us the oxygen we carry and, when done, expels us in the glare of the setting sun’s mirror. Depleted, we stare dead ahead, sway with the bus’s every lurch. Though I hold out hope of engaging your gaze, of looking at and through you
and having you look at and through me to find there a different station, the state of play prevails. Power is hard-‐wired. Frequent, random surges move, heat and light the world. Our view is defined for us. If you see something, say something. Yet the original design was meant to be humane -‐ it would matter less that we’re watched than that we thought we were, our behavior regulated, our productivity insured. My father admonished: always act as if someone’s watching. Perhaps he was right. Lights come on in the offices one by one, the pattern on the blue building haphazard, like a punch card’s. It seems we work later and later for less and less, razor thin margin, razor thin tower standing sentry over the city that encircles it. Any day I’m busting out. Want in?
MBTA Bus Poems By Liam Day Callie Crossley Show April 2012
#28 – Gospel Music Walk far enough now, my left knee gets sore. It’s what buses are for, the roads they run on, some planned – laid out in a grid – some unplanned, emerging from paths worn in grass, cobbled, then paved. Farmers farm the farms they call home. When they built factories, they built dorms to go with them. Until horses drew trolleys, it never dawned on anyone to live one place and work another. The first farm needed no tending. We named the livestock, but lacked restraint. Funny how the mind fixates on what it can’t know. The Torah tells it well: how we fell. We’ve wandered since – across continents, across oceans, across the sky in winged cylinders that glint in a setting sun’s light. Trickles become streams, streams rivers, rivers torrents. Torrents flood cities, the floods collect in neighborhoods like tidal pools as the surge recedes – from Italy to the North End, from Poland to South Boston, from the shtetl to Warren Street and Blue Hill Ave. When waves roll in, sucking up the water in their paths, they reveal, before they break, bare slopes of sand, but even a tsunami must look from space like a ripple on a pond’s surface and
though the spirit departs, there's flesh to nourish the grass that grows on graves. The minyans moved, their hulls remain. Worn, Stars of David etched in stone still adorn the churches that were synagogues, filled now by new waves of congregants, ceaseless, ever rolling, ever washing up on these celestial shores a person, a family, a village at a time. On the 1200 block, the Morningstar Baptist church overlooks the avenue. From it wafts the choir’s voices, keyboard’s accompaniment. Mechanics lounging in a garage’s shade listen to merengue. To my unversed ears it sounds like a record spun too fast. Dressed in Sunday best, old women bend like the accordion buses that ply the route to Dudley Square. They lean on canes, press pamphlets in palms as people pass. Travel agents, they mouth hymn and prayer. A few more weary days, they say. Hallelujah, by and by, I’ll fly away.
MBTA Bus Poems By Liam Day Callie Crossley Show April 2012
#43 – Bas Relief The State House’s gold dome crowns the low hill the bus scales as it skirts the Common, city spied through the turning trees on the other side. Barren paths criss-‐cross the pale grass. The driver leans on the horn at the cars parked at the stop th before the monument to the 54 Massachusetts Regiment. The cars coming in the other direction idle, respond in kind, blare at the unseen source of congestion down Beacon Street. It’s clear we’re in a rush; winter’s first storm looms. It starts as rain, streams like sperm down the bus’s steam-‐filled windows. September’s weather flouts the equinox, but October, skeins of geese flying migratory routes in late afternoon’s dark sky, swings between what was and will be, warmth and gloom. Ancients tracked seasons by moon, stars, the patterns of the prey they hunted. They built monuments to measure in the light’s angle the time to plant. Some farmers still use almanacs, psychics the planets’ charts, the beach set the arbitrary bookends of Memorial and Labor Days, only between which was white once fashionably acceptable. Tides leave unbroken lines of seaweed on empty beaches. We sat on the deck’s rail doing the crossword, sat shoulder to shoulder, skin to skin, growing colder and colder. Glowing like a cigarette, the sun slipped behind the trees on the other bank of the inlet. How long ago it seems. Still we rush.
Though light lingers, rare among us is the third eye to perceive the concentric rings in the pond from which we struggle to crawl out on shore. 14 years from plaster cast to bronze relief: black soldiers and white officer. Daily we pass without a glance, dodge the tourists trying to appreciate the sacrifice between the SUVs. Amygdalas: reptilian seeds flashing more, more.
MBTA Bus Poems By Liam Day Callie Crossley Show April 2012
# 89 – He Was My Age When He First Painted A Pink Lady Willem de Kooning used any material he could – paper, canvas, cardboard – to make art. Fine cracks would open in the oil, which he’d apply and scrape off, apply and scrape off, the layers collecting like sediment, sometimes spreading like a desert wash left by a flash flood. With newspapers, he’d mop up the excess oil and the inverted print of a column or ad turned his images to text, lets us know now what they bought then. When done, he’d start over, trace the outline of the image from one canvas to the next, apply new paint, scrape it off, apply more, the disfigured figures of anonymous women growing only more disfigured through the course of his career, much as we grow only more disfigured through the course of ours, no matter the mornings I’m ashamed to divulge I moisturize in the vain hope that no one will notice or care about the wrinkles radiating from the corners of my eyes. I’m sure Heidi doesn’t look the same as when she held out hope of something in her lovely hand. The pain and humiliation she wrought she neither noticed nor cared about.
We can take solace or misery from the city, which, like me, changes, like I hope she has changed as discernibly as any image passed forward. Where the bus crests Winter Hill coming up Broadway from Ball Square, one sees spread before him, rising like great oaks from thickets of tripledeckers, Bunker Hill Monument, St. Francis de Sales, Schrafft’s factory, Hood’s smokestack, to the north that awful green bridge and the newer plants belching fumes that on a day like this dissolve like breath. Bodegas line the strip where the Irish mobs waged war. I played basketball at Trum Field, got my coffee at the Lebanese place at the end of the block, my first bottle of Gewurztraminer at the new wine store to impress her. Slowly, canvas after canvas, the pink lady begat more pink ladies. There was Laney and Jess, Adina, both Kims. Still, despite the layers I apply and scrape off, the images I transpose carry the weight of memories that make me wince. Heidi spent the party dancing with someone else. I spent it in the corner watching her.
MBTA Bus Poems By Liam Day Callie Crossley Show April 2012
#92, 93 – Fear of Falling The collapsed right side of the face of the man standing next to me at the stop looks like someone punches it daily. The bus we wait to take to Charlestown is one my wife and I took to meet our financial advisor, the year we'd need of one, which is to say the year we could afford it. Each time the message the same: save for tomorrow, defer until tomorrow, which is to say deprive yourself until tomorrow. If you meet your goals, reward yourself on the way home with a light dinner and a glass of wine. Eat sitting at the bar. Split the appetizer, skip the dessert. Ignore the guy with the half caved-‐in face now begging for fare. He's a bad investment. If he starts talking to himself, put headphones on. You don't have to listen to music; just having the buds in means you don't have to pretend you're listening to his disembodied rants and, by some miracle we'll call the distributive property of sense, if you can pretend you can't hear him, you can pretend you can't see him. Still, much as we might resist the gravitational pull of those around us, we walk through the world as worlds, depressing time and space like an old mattress.
We might lay our heads on separate sides of the bed, but by the morning we roll to the middle. There you can hear your spouse scream and, if you're lucky, she can hear you. I take the bus one way, walk back, weather unseasonable. I sweat under the bulk of my hooded sweatshirt, which I don as a sop to the kid I'm not. I'm supposed to be farther than this, farther than a city bus can take me. Two routes from downtown lead to the same place, one over the hill, one around it. Here, farmers fell to a global empire, but the victory was Pyrrhic. The colonies won. Today, we use both dollars and guns, but God forbid some two-‐bit hood try to use one to steal money instead of invest it. It's the car theft capital of America. So every movie set here tells us.