Kneeling Bus (by Fanny Howe)
Kneeling Bus (by Fanny Howe)
Original Text
Fanny Howe, On the Ground (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004).
This
poem is reproduced on the Griffin Prize Web Site (from a volume on the 2005 International Shortlist).
1Hello air
2Infinity is colonizing my mind
3It’s as if a cornerstone is familiar
4but not the building
5It this illness, senility, amnesia, fatigue, wine,
6medication or history
7diminishing my memory
8to the length of a bed?
9Friends are often abandoned for passion
10That Person walking the path I cut for him
11from the elevator
12to the hotel bar
13His escape occurred
14while no one was there to care.
15…
16If daily bread extends its quota
17of air; and if heaven can’t manage what earth can
18If you are 55 degrees below zero and dying
19there were no better times left!
20When telephone wires are words trying
21to be one sound -and the gray flannel sky
22blurs on millions while they look forward
23and no sense dares return empty
24each container creates its fear of portion.
25See the icy shape of a cowboy on a mirror?
26Animals turned into legends--The Tacky Little Lion--
27and silver bars
28across the doors into the Church of Einstein?
29Hail, curved time: “This labor camp is my cathedral.”
30…
31I couldn“t tell the end
32from the beginning
33or one side from another
34(west on the left?)
35But I did seek structure
36in a minute.
37The models got smaller
38the closer they were studied
39too close I wiped my eyes
40and cried.
41This created
42a problem for separating
43the last impression from
44the most ancient.
45 Two shoes on a curtain
46 Shadows thicker than a
47 wax-white stripe.
48 A floating paper bag
49 colored rubber
50 Drop-shaped leaves
51 and silver lifted
52 invisible thinking
53 about terrible nothing:
54 all in one blow.
55If I look up
56I see the end bends down
57into today’s eternity.
58I am no one.
59I know hell and have hope.
60Let me travel the M11 down to Greystones
61with my brother
62as happy a soul as he is
63and see the silver spears
64of towers symbolically
65built into the deep dream state.
66Let me who? Who will let me?
67Whom am I addressing?
68Time covered sky
69over multiple eyes
70A winter city’s
71ice is an oyster
72inside a pearl.
73A slow bus,
74a frightened terrorist, a girl …
75My church is this machine rolling
76the people along and sometimes
77my church is a public latrine, sometimes
78I drop on my knees and fall
79across a chair like a coat in an empty room
80Sometimes I whisper help
81to interrupt my wheeling brain.
82I never learned how to live with a stranger
83or an underground train.
84Sometimes my church is a Franciscan chapel
85near Penn Station. Beads rattle.
86People sleep, mutter and curse.
87When I leave this bus
88a thanks to the driver is to cross and live
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
2011