Your Greyhound poem

You will forget the brown stains on the fuzzy blue seats
The torn covers and springs creeping into your back
The smell of strangers too close to you
Their abused, drug-beaten lives they must spill all over the bus

The taste of old pastries and powdered cheese
The hours when you’re stretched thin waiting
To just stop, so you can move your spine, your knees
Any movement of muscle and bone, please God I can’t take another minute of this

You will forget how a stark, empty station at 4 a.m.
Can make you hate Baltimore or Milwaukee
Cities that meant nothing to you, with a dead-sick fury

But you tell them all back home, every time
When you woke not knowing if this was North Dakota or Montana
When you saw the kind-faced man in Butte, huddling his Styrofoam coffee cup

So you might as well only remember
The pleasure of yellow lines being swallowed for hundreds of miles,
Sharing your bag of chocolate with Asia, moving from Great Falls to New Hampshire
For a boy she barely knew

And always remember, (since it’s just as true
As angry, exhausted people in Chicago lines,
Sleeping on cold black benches, getting grifted out of 20 bucks
By one hard luck story or another)

When you’ve made friends with every face on your bus
Even if you’re keeping to yourself this route
Remember when the driver is steady and patient
When it’s midnight and the skies over Lima, Montana are turquoise-lit

Over one brooding yellow Motel sign
And you can’t get the scene in a photo, but you fix it in your mind
And the diner’s decor is pink-precious, but the girl at the counter is an angel,
The bus driver laughs with the fry cook over nothing much

And you take your black coffee and your rhubarb pie back onto the bus
And you should be sleeping, but you couldn’t possibly

San Francisco

Tobin, last night we staggered into Station 40, weak from a mosh-pit battle
To open couches in rooms divided by hanging blankets
Feet on floorboards, all night creaks of lives spent passing through

Carving out life from dumpsters and dead industries
And we wake to cut oranges and apples for an anarchist named Irish
Fruit that has almost turned, though the smell tears my stomach anyway

But we leave this place with thanks, to find our own way
To take our dirty teeth and sleep-stained lips outside
To the San Francisco streets, wondering where the coffee is

I make you stop for the best graffiti
“Sanctuary city for the rich”
“Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos”

A Levis ad turned to an anarchist call,
“Don’t work”
You take me to see Bernal Hill

So we climb through the cigarette butts
And the yellow summer dust, the weedy pink clover,
Past the joggers and dogs, you in your dog-eared khakis shoes your mother is dying to throw out

And there are blackberries covering the last ridge
And we praise our free breakfast, yell to Gavin Newsom
Find some citation to stop us from eating your berries

Below us now, the whole city is a perfect model city
And we feel the wind, the kind that always climbs
The kind you can never find on the ground

Grandpa

You would hate the idea,
Still I want to get tattooed for you
I was thinking
A pair of sneakers
And the word pathetic,
On the right side of my left calf
For all the times you would look up and down
Your eyes fall on a family member’s shoes
Mine, perhaps green converse, red and black checked laces
And then you would croak out the same verdict
Pathetic!

And all of us would laugh
Every single time. Grandma too
After 60 years together
That I knew not to envy
You were a bossy husband, a lacking father
Trained in leave me alone
Let the kids win and lose their own battles
Make their own pick-up games in Pittsburgh Birdland lots
Offer comments only if the kids try to wear white socks
Or show evidence of being Hippie-Democrats

You stopped going up to Canada before I could remember
Though there’s that picture of me in your arms
On the porch overlooking the family stretch of Lake Erie
Both of us bald, you tan and looking more the Navy man
then usual. You holding me aloft
As you sit in a beach chair looking so happy to look at me

And then there’s the photo of you, Grandma and Aunt Boo
At a party in your 50s (You went to parties, Grandpa?)
When Grandma’s hair still lingered Red
As your nickname for her
Boo’s leg is draped across your lap
And you beam, as Grandma feigns shock
Here is my sister-in-law’s leg, your face says
And I don’t think I ever saw you look
Quite like that

I can’t put any of that on my left calf, Grandpa

But I thought about a bigger tattoo
Maybe just black ink
One of your mix tapes you made from the radio
Carefully wrote down the song and artist
Then lost the all the covers
The tapes scattered on your TV tray
But you could always find the one you were looking for
Your stop and start was always a little slow
So you would push play and
Trumpet, saxophone, piano, someone swinging out some old song
Maxine Sullivan, Frank Sinatra, Count Basie the king

You saw them all long before
You ever saw me
But I used to sit and see you
Play air piano, bobbing your head
You might say listen to this cat
Listen to how he played the horn
I learned to love the music
But to love watching you more

I’d like to put all that in the tattoo you would hate
But I’d stop, like all children’s stories, before the end
Before your heart seized and faded you away
No longer king, but trapped in your old chair
Like a cicada skin stuck fast to an oak tree
Dazed most of the day

You couldn’t keep your head up
You couldn’t stay warm
In spite of the space heater
Grandma tried to bring back Basie, Benny, Peggy
But they wore out
When you wore out

And Grandpa
When they took you to the hospice
Dad called me
Told me not to come
So I followed my sudden, choking need
For a pack of the Dentyne cinnamon gum you used to chew
(Not the Marlborough Reds that clogged your heart)
And then I found a Maxine Sullivan record

And I just missed my chance to tell you
How much I learned to love that damn record

Maybe I should just get a tattoo
With all the things I hadn’t said yet
On my the right side of my left calf, I’ll have the tattoo man write
Grandpa, did you ever see Jack Teagarden?
Why wasn’t Maxine Sullivan as big as Peggy Lee?
I almost like her better, Grandpa
But you have to love Peggy Lee