On a Vienna tram

Heaving, the mid-life woman in a wheelchair

had evidently heard some horrific news,

and the stolid man sitting straight behind

must have been the purveyor of such blues.

‘Divorce’ he may have whispered, or ‘be gone’:

their final ride from Ottakring, a journey

many years too long or scarcely just begun.

The wheels below her changed into a gurney—

maybe so: a prognosis of stage five

that only sunk in now and in a tram

familiar, blocks away from CAT scans, teams

of doctors, chaplains, those who give a damn…

At Volkstheatre, someone else stepped on

and stretched her neck to ask what she could do:

‘You’re stranded? Oh, I see you’re with that man—’

He nodded not, as the woman sobbed anew

and reached her hand to touch his stony face.

He never flinched but stared outside and then

perhaps at me—blinded not by tears, he

could not view the spectacle they’d been.

I’d taught that day Szymborska’s poem: ‘for me

the true tragedy begins with Act Six.’

The actors play their different parts and greet

the devastated world with smiles that fix

relations, households, rubble from the past.

They’ll ruin again tomorrow; for now, well,

let the evening rest. I gotta catch my tram,

lest my lady (or my man) gives me hell.

Reluctantly, I disembarked and left

the couple to their corner in the tram;

the city opened up, I walked my part

and mouthed a prayer for those who give a damn.