olympia

This morning's early subway ride was a poem of happenstance, all perfectly true:

1) Propped against a wall, sitting on the sidewalk, a woman, maybe 40, still pretty, dirty.  Drunk, with her malt liquor can in a paper bag.  I pass and she cries out, as if burning: You are an imbecile.

2) I step down into the subway station, and a Sikh, maybe 30, looking dazed, mutters at me then loses interest.  As I pass, his eyes turn to the clock overhead and he says, mechanically and softly, as if recalling a truth: It is 3:52.

3) Waiting for the train.  Construction workers climb up from the tracks, about eight of them, a Whitman's Sampler of manhood.  They gripe, joke, and call out to their co-worker on the opposite platform.  The thick-necked guy with the earring is laughing loud, square-bodied and cocksure.  A just-smaller fellow orbits him without realizing it.  The older foreman's face has started to turn jowly, but he is still in his prime, is given deference, stands just apart.  And the miscellaneous men, actually looking miscellaneous, not quite belonging, waiting to go home.

4) The Sikh has walked over to them.  He says, in an unsteady shout: Can I ask you a question?  His tone is so unnatural, his loudness so out of range, that they take him for crazy and laugh at him nervously, but somehow not offensively.  The Sikh sits on the bench they'd gathered around.  He leaves them alone; they leave him alone.  Somehow he seems the bird and they seem the tree.

5) The tree protects the bird.  The bird quiets the tree.

6) The train comes, creeping in.  Construction.  An empty car except for one couple, walled in by their luggage, wrapped heavily in tape marked Аэрофлот: Russians.  She is fat but beautiful.  Cheeks like small apples, and a pink complexion.  And he?  Leni Riefenstahl would have cast him, and given him an undressed, sporting role.  His elegant frame is just strong enough, and his face structure handsomely implies brutal capacities.  But the blondness, as I focus in, is bleach.  And his nervous eyes tell all, as he turns to her.  She, not he, is their strength.

7)  I arrive at my station and step to the escalator.  I pass the small lady in a Muslim veil of cream-colored cotton and feel her tense.  She is afraid of me, the passing presence behind, and in my mind I think to her: peace.