Bill Zavatsky. Photo by Nora Howard
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104 Bus Uptown
How bad can it be,
dear wacky New York City,
when the first twelve lines
of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
blink down at me
from a poster on this bus
brought to us
courtesy of the MTA
and the Poetry Society of America
(of which, incredibly, I am a member!)
and, to its right, above the rear door,
another poster: Charles Reznikoff’s little poem
about how “the lights go out—”
in the subway
“but are on again in a moment,”
a poem I will be teaching to my students
in a few weeks’ time.
And perched in the center back seat
(she got on at Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street),
sitting all alone, as if on a little stage
lit by the bus-window daylight of midtown New York,
the beautiful actress Beverly D’Angelo
whom I can’t bring myself to ask
if she is Beverly D’Angelo, except that I
recognize the perfection of her charming overbite
as she chews gum like mad over wild blue eyes agog,
behaving as if she’s never sat on a bus before
or as if she expects a passenger to leap up
at any moment and cry, “Action!,”
with the cameras rolling like the eyes in my head
as I turn now and again to look at her
in her white jacket and skirt that don’t
quite match, a silk turquoise blouse
that color-keys her enormous eyes
(which just got off with the rest of her
at 57th and Eighth), and I’m lucky
enough to have been handed this
piece of paper twenty minutes ago
by someone on the street who must be
a secret agent for poetry, though it seems
to be merely an advertisement flyer
for 45th Street Photo, on the back of which
I’ve just written this poem
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Bill Zavatsky has published two full-length books of his own poetry, most recently Where X Marks the Spot (Hanging Loose Press), three chapbooks, and two books of co-translation (Earthlight: Poems by André Breton, with Zack Rogow; and The Poems of A. O. Barnabooth by Valery Larbaud, with Ron Padgett). His poems have appeared on CDs by Bill Evans and Marc Copland. He has been teaching since time immemorial, most recently a poetry workshop via Morningside Poets in Manhattan. [For more information on, and poems by, Bill Zavatsky, check this link.]
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Beverly D’Angelo