across from the gas station a bus stopped every ten minutes under the blue streetlight and discharged a single passenger. Never more than one. A one-armed man with a cane. A girl in red leather. A security guard carrying his lunch box. They stepped into the light, looked left, then right, and disappeared. Otherwise, the street was empty, the wind off the river gusting paper and leaves. Then the pay phone near the bus stop started ringing: for five minutes it rang, until another bus pulled in and a couple stepped off, their hats pulled down low. The man walked up the street, but the woman hesitated, then answered the phone and stood frozen with the receiver to her ear. The man came back to her, but she waved him away and at the same moment her hat blew off and skidded down the street. The man followed it, holding his own hat, and the woman began talking into the phone. And she kept talking, the wind tossing her hair wildly, and the man never returned and no more busses came after that.
– Nicholas Christopher, from Poetry 180, An Anthology of Contemporary Poems, p. 113
