Pieta
​
By Ann Conway
 ​

​On the bus a man lurches forward and stumbles down the aisle toward me.
I had noticed him, this man who stared
from the side facing seats in front.
He was fiftyish and still handsome,
but seemed diminished;
the effect of his powerful body
held back by a blurred look, a confusion about the eyes.
This man, of whom I was a little afraid, crashes
into the seat across from me, where an older woman sits by the scratched window.
She has grey permed hair, is stocky and barefaced.
The man—her son? husband? now burrows his head into her deep soft chest,
his body gathered so he lies sideways across the seat;
his muscular torso intrudes into the aisle.
 
I gaze at the great curved mound of him as his jacket rides up so
his pale lower back and even the crack of his hairy rear are revealed.
I see the woman pulling him in, her arm around his neck, his shoulder.
Her chin lifts, and her mouth is determined as she
cradles the man on one side,
and clutches her giant pocketbook on the other.
 
When I look around, I see that
none of the dozen or so bus riders are laughing or staring;
instead their eyes are downcast in a sort of reverence.
The daily snarling and lunging
do not live here.
Here, where it seems that
distilled injury,
distilled love
are really all you ever see,
every day, all the time,
on the bus and on the street.