Two teenagers wait for the night bus
dreaming magenta possibilities.
The bus is named for lodgepole pine. When they board, the teenagers surrender their wrists to another layer of wax, so that their possibilities will self-seed. There is always a next forest fire: they do not forget this as much as tell the thoughts of fire to take a seat in the back, to get off their feet.
The teenagers open the windows to clear the smoke. Their arms have been waxed so many times that they appear amber, god-like. “No one really wants all their words to survive,” they tell the bees, who are here for the gossip.
The bees have foraged farther than ever before. Their legs are laced with pollen and they leave traces of it on the moss-coated seats. One teenager sneezes. “Bless you,” say the bees. The bees are tired. “We are all tired,” the bus driver sighs.
The bus driver is chewing juniper berries and spits every other one out the window. The teenagers are talking about kissing. They are talking about Sappho. The bees ask who Sappho was talking about when she sang:
“and this // ruinous god // I swear did not love”
The teenagers do not have an answer. They do not mind that most of what has been written is lost. They themselves have scratched poetry onto every square inch of the bus interior and, should the bus crumble or burn, they would grow new poetry; “nothing really remains as a whole,” they tell each other. Otherwise, why would we each be a part?
The teenagers are waiting to see how everything is gathered up, one day. They’re picking at the gold embroidery, loosening stitches. Their pockets glow with magenta possibilities. “What if the answers will be there,” they whisper, “when we need them?”•
Recently I went on a walk and asked only “what if” questions but kept them to the “what if”s I rarely ask: what if the future is good? what if I have exactly what I need? what if I don’t see the whole picture — what if peace is possible?
Even when I celebrate the fact that I’ve written a “happy” lyric essay, my friends and family tell me it’s still sad. It’s hard to hold the all without there being traces of sad, but I’m trying to lean into possibility more. And that’s why this particular little story has a special place in my heart: I love these teenagers who defy every doomed thought I have. What if they’re right?
What’s an expansive question that you’re asking these days?
If you want more — here are stories from the archives that have a similar heart to today’s:
At this hour, questions become whales.
A man stirs sugar into coffee and offers it to his son. The coffee becomes a padded vest, soft around the boy’s heart. The boy cuts a paper snowflake and tucks it into his chest pocket. The boy walks into the rain. He walks all the way to the ocean. He pulls up a chair and begins to question:
The girl’s hand is already carved in questions
There is a particular green of old trees who know dry thoughts even as the world is soaked. The trees swallow light, one sigh of it at a time, the feathers of the sun inhaled every day. The girl does not know how sweet this is: the song of old growth. The girl’s palm is already carved in questions and so she believes the same of the tree’s rough bark, t…
Three hundred years after a forest burns,
Six days after the flames black bears return for berries. The restoration of the world leaks through a broken dam and still lichen survives on the held breath of alpine rocks; deep in the bushes bear cubs feast, teeth to tender blue planets.
You paint an interesting picture. The teenagers are right to defy doomed thoughts. Smoke and burning of the glorious temple and Jerusalem were in the story I read this morning in 2 Kings. It all seems so hopeless, tragic, unrecoverable, purposeless--doomed. The question "why?" looms large. It is the same question I have as I daily watch my mother slowly dying of cancer and alzheimers. Yet, the last paragraph of 2 Kings gives hope. This was not the end. Something even more glorious is coming. So it is with my mom. Her faith in Jesus Christ, in His death and resurrection gives her rock solid assurance that she is not doomed but has life with our glorious King of the cosmos to look forward to. So, she endures with great hope. Interesting that yesterday she prayed for all young people --teenagers-- to know the reality of Jesus Christ. The answers are in Him. Did she somehow know that you wrote this poem :)?
Pretty darn good