A Pocket Full of Other People's Rain
A cycle of poems follows a night bus driver who carries home the weather her passengers cannot name, then learns which storms belong to her.
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How it begins
1. LAST SERVICE
The woman boards with rain on the inside of her coat.
Outside, the pavement is dry. I do not mention this.
She pays for the whole route, although the hospital is only four stops away.
Some fares are a request to keep moving.
At the river, she folds her hands around an absence the size of a paper cup.
I drive slowly over the broken patch before the bridge.
It is a small thing, not making a stranger hold herself together against another jolt.
2. POCKET
At home I hang my coat beside the door.
Water gathers in the left pocket.
I find a cloud there, creased and tired, with one bright edge it has not yet given up.
My daughter says I should stop bringing work home.
She means the timetable. She means my face.
I tip the pocket into the kitchen sink.
For a moment, the drain smells of wet leaves outside a building I have never entered.
Then the kettle clicks.
There are ordinary things I am allowed to answer first.
3. CHANGE
The man who counts his coins twice is not counting coins.
The woman who misses her stop has recognized something in a window.
The boy with the enormous headphones is listening to nothing. I know because once I did the same.
All night the bus asks me to open, to close, to open.
At the depot, Nadia waits for her connection.
"Who takes you home?" she asks.
I nearly say the bus.
I nearly make a joke small enough to fit between us.
Instead I tell her which road I walk after the lights go out.
She nods.
Tomorrow, she says, she can walk that far.
The rain in my pocket does not stop.
For the first time, I let it be rain.
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Outline and characters
Develop this idea
For a poetry collection about empathy, choose a recurring physical practice that can hold varied emotions. Mae's route offers stops, fares, reflections and changes in weather without requiring every poem to explain the same lesson. Let some passengers remain unknowable. Vary line length and use concrete sounds before abstract feeling. Your version could follow another form of public work, with the sequence gradually revealing what the speaker needs as well as what they notice in others.
- The first sequence listens to weather people bring aboard
- A passenger's wet coat introduces the book's pocket image
- Workplace poems examine the price of constant availability
- A river crossing interrupts the driver's habit of naming other people's grief
- A recurring passenger asks who takes the driver home
- The middle sequence admits anger beneath useful kindness
- Domestic poems distinguish care from carrying every burden
- The driver leaves one imagined storm at its proper stop
- The final route makes room for imperfect reciprocal help
- A closing pocket holds ordinary rain without needing to explain it
Characters
- Mae Lorne, 52. Night bus driver whose poems collect passengers' unspoken weather
- Nadia Vale, 46. Regular passenger who asks the driver what she carries home
Series possibilities
- A companion collection follows the morning route through places the night driver only knows by their lights.
