wonder at what can befall the most ordinary afternoon of early love

Rush Hour

Someone has folded a coat under the boy's head, someone else, an Arab
              businessman in not very good French,
is explaining to the girl, who seems to have discovered, like this, in the
              crowded Métro,
her lover is epileptic, that something must be done to keep the boy from
              swallowing his tongue:
he works a billfold between the rigidly clenched teeth as the kneeling
              girl silently looks on,
her expression of just-contained terror transfiguring her, generalizing her
              almost to the mythic,
the very image of our wonder at what can befall the most ordinary afternoon
              of early love.
The spasms quiet, the boy, his left ear scarlet from rubbing the wool,
              comes to, looks up at the girl,
and she, as the rest of us begin to move away, hesitates, then lays her
              cheek lightly on his brow.


"Rush Hour" by C.K. Williams, from Collected Poems. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.