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Subway Seethe

By J. Allyn Rosser b. 1957

What could have been the big to-do

that caused him to push me aside

on that platform? Was a woman who knew

there must be some good even inside

an ass like him on board that train?

Charity? Frances? His last chance

in a ratty string of last chances? Jane?

Surely in all of us is some good.

Better love thy neighbor, buddy,

lest she shove back. Maybe I should.

It's probably just a cruddy

downtown interview leading to

some cheap-tie, careerist, dull

cul-de-sac he's speeding to.

Can he catch up with his soul?

Really, what was the freaking crisis?

Did he need to know before me

if the lights searching the crowd's eyes

were those of our train, or maybe

the train of who he might have been,

the person his own-heart-numbing,

me-shoving anxiety about being

prevents him from ever becoming?

How has his thoughtlessness defiled

who I was before he shoved me?

How might I be smiling now if he'd smiled,

hanging back, as though he might have loved me?

Source: Poetry (April 2005).

Biography

J. Allyn Rosser was born in Pennsylvania and attended Middlebury College in Vermont as well as the University of Pennsylvania where she earned a doctorate. Her works include Bright Moves (1990), which won the Morse Poetry Prize, and Misery Prefigured (2001), winner of the Crab Orchard Award. In 2007 she was awarded The New Criterion Poetry Prize for a new book of poems entitled Foiled Again, published in the Fall of 2007. . . .

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