A Stranger Quoted a Poem Back to Me
On a night bus, my own published lines returned from a stranger's mouth.
I quit poetry at 11:40 on a Thursday night, and a stranger on the night bus gave it back to me before it was technically Friday. Both things happened within four miles of each other, which is either a coincidence or the city showing off.
The quitting part first, because it was earned. I had just given a reading at the Marsh Lane community center to an audience of three: the organizer, who had to be there; a woman knitting something long and hostile; and a man who, it emerged at the break, was early for chess club and thought this was chess club. He stayed anyway, out of politeness or inertia, and during my longest poem he fell asleep with the dignity of a public statue.
Sixteen years of writing. Three journals, two prizes nobody outside the prizes has heard of, one slim collection with a print run smaller than my building's tenant list.
And a man dreaming of chess while I read the best thing I ever made.
I helped stack the chairs. I said thank you to the organizer, who said, "The numbers are usually better," which is the kind of sentence that follows you home. Then I stood at the bus stop in the cold and composed, in my head, the retirement announcement I would never actually post anywhere because no one would notice a poet retiring. That is the joke at the center of the whole business. You cannot quit a job nobody can see you doing.
The night bus came, the N14, lit up like an aquarium and nearly as empty. Floor sticky, air ninety percent fried chicken, a scratched lottery ticket doing laps under the seats every time we braked. I took the window and watched my own reflection ride along outside, over the shuttered shops, like a ghost with better posture.
Two girls sat three rows ahead, early twenties. One was crying. Not performance crying: the quiet, leaking kind you do when the night has outlasted you. From the fragments I could not help hearing, she had lost a job she hated and was devastated anyway, which is a very specific human weather and I remember it exactly.
Her friend tried the usual things. Water bottle. "He's an idiot," though no he had been mentioned. Half a protein bar. And then, when the crying did not stop, the friend sat up straight, took a breath like a diver, and recited.
"Nobody is asked to survive the whole night at once," she said. "You only have to make it to the kettle."
The bus went on humming. The lottery ticket slid by under the seats.
And I sat there with my heart going like a struck tuning fork, because those were my lines.
Mine.
From a poem called "Small Weather" that I wrote nine years ago at my sister's kitchen table and entered into a monthly poetry contest because the entry was free and my confidence was not. It placed third. It was published in a journal that folded two years later. As far as I knew, that poem had lived and died in a print run of four hundred copies, and I had grieved it the way you grieve a hope you were embarrassed to have held.
Except... Except I wrote "you only have to make it to morning."
She said kettle.
I want to be honest about the order of my reactions, because the order is damning. First: euphoria... Second, arriving about one second later: someone changed my line. It is possible to be resurrected and copyedited in the same breath, and I do not recommend feeling both at once on public transport.
I leaned forward... I had no plan. "Sorry," I said. "That thing you just said... Where's it from?"
The friend turned around, wary the way you rightly are on a night bus, then decided I looked harmless, which at my age and in my coat is accurate. "No idea," she said. "My mum's got it on the fridge. It's been there forever. Held up with a magnet from Tenerife."
She found a photo on her phone and passed it back: an index card gone soft at the corners, handwriting leaning hard to the right, my four lines almost exactly. And there it was in blue ink. The kettle.
"Mum copied it off a noticeboard at St. Bart's," the friend said. "Years ago, when our nan was in for her hip. Some nurse used to pin poems up in the relatives' room. Mum says it got her through that whole winter, so it went on the fridge, and now it gets said at," she gestured at her crying friend, at the bus, at the night in general, "whenever this happens."
Do you see the route? I wrote it at a kitchen table. A journal with four hundred readers printed it. One of those readers was, apparently, a nurse with a pin and good taste in relatives' rooms. A tired daughter copied it standing up, wrongly or improvingly, onto an index card.
The card outlived the journal, the noticeboard, and possibly the nurse's whole career, and nine years later the lines stepped out of a stranger's mouth on the N14 while their author sat three rows back, freshly retired.
The poem had been alive the entire time. It just had not been living with me.
Here is the part I am still deciding whether I am proud of.
I did not tell them.
I came close... The sentence was in my mouth: actually, funny story.
And then I looked at the crying girl, who had stopped crying, who was holding her friend's phone and reading the fridge card with her lips moving, and I understood that the poem was working precisely because nobody owned it. At 2 a.m., unsigned, it belonged to her mum, the magnet, the nan's hip, the winter it got them through. Signed, it would have belonged to a man whose last audience was an accidental chess player.
Some gifts you can only ruin by putting your name back on them.
"Whoever wrote it," the friend said, handing the phone back, "I hope they know."
"I think they do," I said, and my voice did something on the last word that both of them were kind enough to ignore.
I got off one stop early on purpose. I wanted the walk. The street was empty in that good, wide, 2 a.m. way, streetlights laying down their circles like stepping stones, and I walked through them one at a time saying the line aloud with the correction in it.
You only have to make it to the kettle.
She was right, the mum, whoever she is. Morning is an abstraction. A kettle is a plan. Nine years I had defended the weaker word without knowing I was in an argument.
At home I did not write the retirement post. I opened the old file instead, changed one word, and typed underneath: revised by a stranger's mother, St. Bart's, unknown winter. Then I stayed up too late reading profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, all these people mailing their lines out into the dark, and I wanted to tell every one of them what I now know and cannot prove: that being unheard and being unread are not the same thing, and you rarely get to find out which one you are.
The numbers, the organizer said, are usually better. Maybe. But I have seen my real numbers now. They are a fridge in a house I will never visit, a magnet from Tenerife, and one girl on a night bus who stopped crying.
I put the kettle on at half past two in the morning and stood in the kitchen listening to it climb toward its little whistle, and I am not ashamed to tell you I laughed alone like a man who has just been paid.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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