The Bus to Oualidia
i.m. Denise Inge
Further south, the bus stops at places maps dismiss: a junction with a dirt road, a stray concrete hut, a broken-down garage with a painterly pump – places where those who will share the ride wait never doubting that out of the intractable distance, the dust ragged up by the Atlantic, the mystical flame-orange sunset February is displaying like the tail feathers of winter, their bus will come.
And along with the moustachioed men, the scarfed mothers, there’ll be foreigners, two young women on the right half-way down, who’ll need to be told they’ve arrived, who’ll be unaware as the door closes and they wait for the bus to pull away – the man with the mint still gusting its scent from the brush of their bags – that they’ve just stepped down from a memory.
They drop off some details, pick up others, keeping it on the road for twenty years, the bus which never rusts. I flag it down still, saving you a place. Through the flame-orange dust, your beautiful face.