On the way to therapy or to play across the water
I have to pass the toll collector;
she always has her hand out by the time I get there,
a gray-brown palm with thick lines
which are dull olive-green, like the money.
I seem to get her booth so often that I know her
(in the sense of ‘at first sight’)
though I’ve only seen the upper half of the uniformed body.
She faces two kinds of ugliness all day:
ugliness which moves and that which doesn’t:
the still white tablets and tubes of the oil company,
thinning this century’s black blood,
oil that passes her in one shape or another, either
smooth from the smokestacks
or as amber viscosity, lunging in the trucks.
And behind her back, two kinds of beauty,
beauty that moves and that which doesn’t:
the fish-scale surface of the water
and the beaten-egg-yolk yellow of San Quentin.
So much of everything passes her:
valuable campers, trucks of toxins on their way
to the destruction of the earth,
and lovers pass her . . . I’ve passed her with mine,
chatting, looked across his arm as he hands her the dollar,
but mostly I’m alone in my metal box
holding a hand out to her in hers—
she takes the bill with a slight snap
and when I yell Thanks! (that spattered
exclamation point at the end)
or Hi! (with its expectant i
hooked downward, as if she were supposed to
grab onto the end of it and feel something for me)
she looks at me blankly,
starts unwrinkling the bill at the corners
though the bill isn’t too wrinkled,
she only pretends it’s wrinkled,
the kind of gesture one might make to kill time
what a friend might do if she wanted you
to stay longer while the water boils
so she could tell you of the new, secret joy
or some special need she has
that you could not possibly meet . . .
In the texts I’ve read of those who stand guard
at the many entrances of the many worlds
lest the migrating souls go by
with too much weight—it’s their job to make sure
the journey goes easily,
the debt assumed by heaven is not too great
and I see sometimes that her face absorbs
whatever trouble is least known to me,
and I am no longer apart from her—
she thinks I have given what I owed,
that now I owe her nothing,
and she has started to gesture
forward to the wet, starry haze of the bridge
where a whole line of cars is disappearing
as I must disappear, and the one after me—