Riders on the Storm

sitting at the back as the driver steers us 

along the swooning bootlace road across the river, 

as gigantic reaches and sweeps of the city elbow into the dusk,

retreating and zooming at a hundred-forty percent, as if the view 

weren’t a solid but a misty gray gas with skyscrapers looming forward and 

back, stuck on the bus, misty and defeated, jittery and exhausted, imagining Mister 

Mystery might come to me in a magical way as an apparition or in a literal way as a paying 

customer waiting two stops ahead on Boulevard East, Manhattan efflorescing behind 

his haircut, imagining his lumbering stumble past the middle, with the movement 

of the bus, with the movement of the view, an off-balance stranger, with the

same ducking lids and inspiring height of the dad I haven’t seen in five 

or six years and who’s stopped paying child support and is 

objectively speaking a rotten individual but who 

still for some reason is the perfect and 

beautiful rescuing stranger 

I want to walk 

back here