For every choice I�ve made there�s been options
and in my parallel lives I live quite differently.
One decision, or the lack of it,
places me in alternatives numbered one through infinity.

Here I am, a city bus driver, turning my life
like a large spoke eight hours a day, six days a week.
I know my route and the Cuban girl�s name
who gets off at the laundry mat every Tuesday.
I sit alone at night by an open window pulling the string
of my thoughts. They let me off on any corner of my life.
And I listen to metal scrape break pads in the distance.

In my parallel lives I am what is imagined
by friends whose memory I occupy at times.
I marry a redneck and work as a practical nurse.
He treats me well, as far as rednecks are concerned,
expects dinner when he comes home from General Electric,
sex on weekends and the driveway shoveled in January.
We�ve grown apart, but the baby keeps us together.
On our anniversary, he surprises me with Irises.

Of course, there�s the Galvin Memorial Cemetery
in one of my parallel lives. I�ve never been crazy
about marigolds, but on a blue cloudless day
they seem to burn like several small torches
against my headstone. Hundreds of names surround mine
and birth dates shared by the many silenced voices.
In life I lied to lovers, relatives, friends and strangers;
in death I lie between two women I�ve never spoken to.

I never knew my soul�s agility until my shadow grew
on a wall at dawn inside a cave in Tibet. In a parallel world,
I know what saving feels like, what virginity feels like.

It feels like an eternity has passed since this morning
as I drove by bunches of brown mushrooms
jumping from the church lawn, multifaceted clusters
that multiplied on the even green turf of my thoughts at noon,
invisible until visible, not noticed until noticeable.


� 2004 by Jenni Russell