Other Lives

We’ve subjected you to a lot of stuff about our own writing on this site, so now I’d like to talk about someone else’s.  First, a bit of background: For as long as I can remember, even when I was a child of three or four, I used to watch cars go by, look at the people inside, and realize that these people had entire lives — kids and jobs and dogs, hopes and dreams and sorrows — yet all I was ever going to see of them was this one brief moment.  I used to think about that all the time, and it both bothered and awed me.  (Okay, so I was a weird kid!)  Imagine my amazement when I came upon the following poem by a guy with the decidedly unpoetic name of Vern Rutsala.  It’s called “Other Lives,” and it just blows me away, even 30 years after I first read it.

OTHER LIVES

You see them from train windows
in little towns, in those solitary lights
all across Nebraska, in the mysteries
of backyards outside cities—

a single face looking up,
blurred and still as photograph.
They come to life quickly
in gas stations, overheard in diners,

Loom up and dwindle, families
From dreams like memories too
far back to hold.  Driving by
you go out to all those strange

Rooms, all those drawn shades, those huddled taverns on the highway,
cars nosed-in so close they seem
to touch.  And they always snap shut,
Fall into the past forever, vast lives

over in an instant.  You feed
on this shortness, this mystery
of nearness and regret—such lives
So brief you seem immortal;

and you feed, too, on that old hope—
dim as a half-remembered
phone number—that somewhere
People are as you were always

told they were—people who swim
in certainty, who believe, who age
with precision, growing gray
like actors in a high school play.