Polaroid

Andrew Elliott

I once got talking to a girl on a bus.

Her father had worked for the US Air Force.

She said it had been to do with black shit and stuff.

We had both of us boarded at Corpus Christi.

I had noticed her hair, it was like my own.

From a wide centre parting it fell to no purpose.

She may never have washed it but combed it

till her scalp bled with the kind of comb

in which every other tooth has been broken but one

and which had once been the only thing of value found

on the body of a great-great-great-grandfather

killed fighting on the Yankee side at the battle of Gettysburg.

We could've been twins, we were kind of androgynous（雌雄同体的）.

She talked about growing up, how she'd dropped out of college.

At Laredo two officers boarded the bus.

They checked everyone's papers, everyone but us.

I think I must have mouthed, We're invisible!

because she turned away and stared at her reflection in the glass.

We were falling asleep, that much was obvious

yet every now and then the conversation kind of twitched

and when she said she'd read a book about spontaneous combustion（自燃）

it was as if our souls were suddenly rubbing

like two still green sappy sticks together

in the hope that we might set ourselves blazing --

we were both of us certainly thin enough! --

and so leave on our seats -- their vinyl backs a melted mess --

the ash of our flesh, the little pile of mingled bones,

partly powder where they touch, our skulls

split open down the middle -- and become, as it were,

a crime scene, reported by the driver on arrival in Phoenix

where the photograph taken by forensics

would have found its way somehow into the hands of the press --

cold-eyed men who had seen a lot worse

and who would to be honest have all but ignored it

if it hadn't been for the National Enquirer

whose editor would have hollered, Hold the front page!

and shifted an account, complete with pictures,

of two unidentified elongated objects

travelling at a speed described by the guy

who'd just happened to be out there photographing cacti（仙人掌）

as hyperfreakin retinal dude, across each blown-up's

chromatic vibrations, to that week's centre spread.