One of the things I'd like sometimes
to do from time to time is to approach
to put it rather in a highbrow way the condition of song.
And here's one that I like to think makes that approach.
It's called bus stop.
And comes out of a period in my life
when I lived in San Francisco and felt depressed.
Partly because, unexpectedly, it rained a lot
during a certain period.
And I seem to always to be out walking my dog
while it was raining.
And people were coming home from work, and getting off the bus,
and letting up their umbrellas.
And I didn't really know anybody in my neighborhood
in San Francisco.
So I'd look up into the wind lighted windows
and think, what are they doing?
That feeling of being an alien or a stranger
in a city, all of that feeds into this point a little bit.
Buses stop in Kansas in 20th in Potrero Hill.
Bus stop.
Lights are burning and quiet rooms, where
lives go on resembling ours.
The quiet lives that follow us.
These lives we lead, but do not own stand in the rain
so quietly when we are gone.
So quietly.
And the last bus comes letting dark umbrellas
out black flowers, black flowers.
And lives go on, and lives go on like sudden lights at street
corners, or like the lights in quiet rooms
left on for hours burning, burning.