Meditation on an Evening Bus Ride Home from Work by Dan Stryk

Dan Stryk

Meditation on an Evening Bus Ride Home from Work

SLC, Utah—years ago

A Paiute reservation squaw in zipper-popping blue jeans and straw hat—come down from her Wasatch Mountain camp, no doubt, to do her weekly shop—plonks down heavy right beside me, as the sun sets over blue peaks, on the tape-streaked seat of the nearly empty bus. Her half-smoked fag flicking its ashsparks to the moldering rubber floor right near my shoe. Never a word.

She sits with elbows in, glancing around—flat minnow eyes sweep over me an instant, but are not caught by my own. Her broad brown face floats moonlike now in the window’s darkening slate: more motionless, it seems than an Inca statue’s.

Suddenly this bus in Salt Lake fades into a small canoe on an unknown mountain stream above this World—nowhere near our tired route up Parley’s Way to the depot train, from where she’ll chug into the night of her dead life. No driver now but the <>dark sky’s wind. We are alone. My long day’s migraine soothes as I let my head rest, without fear, in her dark lap … that I now sense, in rippling mist, revive my birth. Never a word. The buzzer sounds. (Who’d pulled the chain back in this life? Had I?)

I rise for my own stop, glance at her face, turned from me once again. Hop down into darkness toward the light of my low-income flat, relieved to join my wife and infant son.


	Dan Stryk Meditation on an Evening Bus Ride Home from Work SLC, Utah—years ago A Paiute reservation squaw in zipper-popping blue jeans and straw hat—come down from her Wasatch Mountain camp, no doubt, to do her weekly shop—plonks down heavy right beside me, as the sun sets over blue peaks, on the tape-streaked seat of the nearly empty bus. Her half-smoked fag flicking its ashsparks to the moldering rubber floor right near my shoe. Never a word. She sits with elbows in, glancing around—flat minnow eyes sweep over me an instant, but are not caught by my own. Her broad brown face floats moonlike now in the window’s darkening slate: more motionless, it seems than an Inca statue’s. Suddenly this bus in Salt Lake fades into a small canoe on an unknown mountain stream above this World—nowhere near our tired route up Parley’s Way to the depot train, from where she’ll chug into the night of her dead life. No driver now but the <>dark sky’s wind. We are alone. My long day’s migraine soothes as I let my head rest, without fear, in her dark lap … that I now sense, in rippling mist, revive my birth. Never a word. The buzzer sounds. (Who’d pulled the chain back in this life? Had I?) I rise for my own stop, glance at her face, turned from me once again. Hop down into darkness toward the light of my low-income flat, relieved to join my wife and infant son.