To the Ode, and: Elegy, with City Bus and Blue-Haired Girl

Abstract

To the Ode, and: Elegy, with City Bus and Blue-Haired Girl Lance Larsen (bio) To the Ode True, you intimidate me, but when I slip you on,like Horace's bathrobe, all things cometo life: an ant as worthy of praise as a phoenix,a Styrofoam cup as capaciousas a Grecian urn. Nothing too trivial for you.Not clouds, not the bent spooncarrying oatmeal to the dowager's mouth,not spotted dogs in heat.Under your watch, Dejection and Joysmoke the peace pipe and take upresidence in adjacent flats.Thanks to you, I talk to my orange juicebefore I drink it, I begin a Q and Awith the rain, sadness and greedconverted into longing. Behind my sternum,an ancient Mayan city. What is water,but a confessor, willing to wash away my grit? [End Page 156] What are train tracks but a ladder to heaventurned on its side? What is a rottingmouse but a country of flies buzzing with praise? Elegy, with City Bus and Blue-Haired Girl If three things made her beautiful waiting to board the 822, four left her lost, though in a month of Thursdays I could never name them. From my seat, I could tally colors—hair several shades of darkening sky, a shopping list in green scribbled up and down her left arm. Or was it a manifesto? She was the last in line, so I had plenty of time not to fall in love. Bright but cold outside, one of those March mornings when if you're a body of water, it's better to flow shallow than run deep—more surface to suck up a feeble sun. But also more brooding, more vulnerability, [End Page 157] more time for a boy with a shaved head to cut in front of her before she stepped on. They faced each other, his back to the bus door. Not this time he said without saying, and crossed his arms in leather. Such things happen in Newark or outside boarded up Conoco stations dreaming of recreational arson, but not here: not in the shadow of Lincoln Middle School—where custodians emptied garbage in French, and ivy falling across the teacher's desk taught everyone to photosynthesize, breathe in, one two three, even on chilly days, even if a girl with blue hair kept saying, Don't bring it, don't bring it, don't bring it. But he had brought it, his body a gate that wouldn't swing, a locked gate that turned everything public. Lost Girl vs. Loser Boy. A hush hung between them, against which she tried to move. He countered. Lovers these two, you could tell, by the way they touched with their eyes. They had entered burning [End Page 158] buildings in tandem, counted petals and uncles on parole, tic-tac-toed the constellations from a broken mattress under a bridge— only not now. Now she shoulder-butted him, and he pushed back. Which made three of us stand up, and two of us reach for our cells. But no, not a push exactly, something short of that, a meanness you could get away with at bus stops, under the trembling of a red-tailed balloon caught in overhead branches that should have signaled desire, but just hung there, a rag. And the school bell, when it sounded, rang out advice: Save her, push him away, try anything. But if we tried, he'd just give it to her worse later on, wouldn't he? Whatever It was. It pushed down on us, tasted the air we drew into our mouths, dripped the stairs to pool at their ankles. Then children poured out for recess. "Miss, do you need some help? Hey, Miss." The driver punctuated his offer with tenderness: [End Page 159] he knelt the bus. Yes, knelt it. In a whoosh of hydraulics, that behemoth dinosaured to its knees. Which offered her something—seconds and second chances, offered her a pause, chivalric and ridiculous, in which children dodge balled and four squared, and all of us dropped fifteen inches out of our newspapers and complacence. Offered. Plenty of...