Bridges Underground

1. Converse
 
We talked last night.
I could almost see you
over the Tenderloin traffic
over the shouts of the lunatic
who still waits at your window
three years after you gave him
that bad dollar.
 
I could almost hear your grin—
but I am looking at the caricature
on your book, overlaying this capture
of a too long ago whimsy
on the now tired timbers of your voice.
 
We have not spoken since you first got
the job in Oakland—a mail clerk under
that psychotic lawyer. I remember
you saying something
about knowing something
was wrong when the senior clerk
had been there only
two weeks—and was mailing
his resume while he interviewed you.
 
You are still there, you say.
Jobs are too hard to come by
to leave. But you have not been
able to write since you sent out
the poem about the dark slivers
of bones you found underneath
the filing cabinet. The ones the lawyer
declared were merely coffee grounds.
You will leave soon, you say.
 
If you can.
I finger the phone.
And knew I should have called sooner.
But didn't. Somehow,
I do not even voice my plea
for your understanding.
 
For seven years, I have had enough
money for food. In a comfortable,
secure office. With complacent,
pleasant people. And I have not found
the price—tiny slivers of my soul
in the bi weekly pay envelope—
too heavy.
 
 
2. Briefs
 
Before he left,
the junior partner, you told me,
took to drinking each time the senior
left for court.
 
He would sit on the first
step of the uncarpeted back
staircase so he could hear
the slats in the hallway creak
when the old man came through
—just in time to rush to the back
bathroom to vomit the last
of the Anchor Steam Ales.
 
This, he told you, ensured
his calm stance while the old man screamed
steamy accusations over his missed
dockets, his trashed train tickets,
or his violet voices crashing in the dark.
 
You did not tell me
what their voices sounded like.
Nor did you tell me their names.
 


3. Subway
 
The BART came into Oakland's
MacArthur Station
at 7:23. So you could spend
27 minutes at the Subway
Sandwich shop next door.
If you could, you bought
coffee and sat exactly
in the center bench.
 
You stared at the wallpaper—
fake black and white lithographs of
the old subway system—a map
of where you had been
when you first knew
she didn't love you. Where you gave
your first reading. Where you heard
the voices of someone's shattered
bones and did not look back.
 
If you could not afford
a coffee, you stared
through the window anyway.
Not once, you told me,
have they asked you to leave.
 


4. Wall paper
 
I walk into the Subway shop at Colfax
and Broadway, just a few blocks from where
I grew up, stepping over dark
clean bones in the shadows
of my Colorado Front Range.
 
I lean back on the bright yellow hard seat.
Here a locked bathroom door guards
against unwashed stenches of vagrants—
old souls of miners and trespassers
just as there the locks keep forgotten
hippies from entering the Subway on Haight.
 
I sit facing your wallpaper,
tracing the same lines you trace
on the other side of the mountains.
 
I have never seen your New York,
but I fancy I feel
the lines of the Manhattan express
thrumming through concrete,
making itself known into
the too many voices.

My hand touches the black lines,
reads the ill fitting joints, the bolts of glue
that slowly separate
the page from the wall.
I try to glue them back with a spare
piece of bright banana pepper.
It slides to the floor.
 
The edges of the Man Who Built The Great Subway
are fraying.
 
 

© Deena Larsen