Bus Trip

All across America children are learning to fly.
On a bus leaving New Hampshire, on a bus
leaving Colorado, I sat next to a child

who had learned how to fly
and she carried her flying clenched
inside both fists. She carried her flying

in a suitcase and in a stuffed dog
made of dirt and the places where she had stood
all night listening to the rain. A child sits

on the roof of a house, she dangles
first one leg, then the other,
as if she were thinking

of how America looks late at night
through the windows of a bus.
From a woman across the aisle, she borrows

a mirror, from a woman in the back
a lipstick. Keep it, a voice says.
From a man she takes a cigarette,

which she taps against her thigh.
The man closes his eyes
over her body, such a small body

he could lift it to his mouth
with one hand. In a bathroom she buys a comb
with a quarter borrowed from me

and insists I write down
my name and address so she can return it
from L.A. or from Chicago or from wherever it is

someone she hasn't met yet is waiting for her.
In the dark of the bus she combs her hair.
And what she says to me is a song

that takes only three minutes
to hear, which I accept
like a stick of gum. Now you tell me

the songs you like best,
she says.
And I do.

~Susan Mitchell