On the streetcar

A busy day--a quick stride to a meeting some twelve blocks away, back home and lunch, streetcar to another meeting, streetcar home quick dinner, and in a few minutes I leave to catch another streetcar to a poetry reading: Jane Hirshfield at Powell's City of Books.

I love to ride the streetcar. I feel on it the moment of being confined with complete strangers, all of us hurtling through the streets together in a common direction for that moment. Wherever we come from, in this moment we are going somewhere together, calmly surrendered to wait together, each of us with our own weight of private griefs, loves that failed, jobs that weren't what we hoped or worse--no job at all, each of us with losses, with death, with illnesses unbearable, with high hopes, fears, preoccupations and love. Here. In this moment, together. My feeling for us swells nearly to bursting as I ride the streetcar in silence with a crowd of strangers.

Edit: this poem added after the reading, my favorite of the new poems:

China

Whales follow
the whale-roads.
Geese,
roads of magnetized air.

To go great distance,
exactitudes matter.

Yet how often
the heart
that set out for Peru
arrives in China,

Steering hard.
Consulting the charts
the whole journey.

--Jane Hirshfield.