Waiting for the bus
as the September afternoon's rain
reaches the bench under the canophy
I try to read a book I have with me,
but an old drunken man
on the other bench
sipping Coca Cola from a can
starts to talk about his art collection
in his small 31 sq meter apartment,
only one famous forgery
among them, he says, telling
then how he had shared
a train trip with professor Pertti Hemánus,
had drank with the son of Väinö Linna
after a hockey game
in which they both had played in,
how he had been a scuba diver
and how he gave
half a million to his daughter
- just one of his eight children -
when he thought he was dying,
talks until kids after school gather
clearly waiting for something
and he hands out money for them
in what seems like a regular event
while people going past
from another drunken old man
with an ancient bicycle
to a handicapped youth
who says he is going to hospital
in Tampere - I moved there
in 1965, he says to the youth -
stop to talk with him.
Then my bus comes
and I walk to it in the drizzle
with my shopping bags,
a bus even older than myself,
one that could have stopped here
when the bus station still stood
and as a treat when small children
we could get from the caféteria
there cream buns
and small bottles of green lemonade,
and the old drunken man stays there,
sitting on the bench
with nowhere to go
but that little apartment
full of art
he said his children
don't care about,
his wife dead four years.
He had asked me
how old humans were as a species
and I had told him
three hundred thousand years
when it comes to modern humans
and sometimes it feels
one can feel the weight of all those years
resting upon us
even in the little details
of lives that are nearing their end
like railroad tracks that now end,
rusting, somewhere between towns.
15.-24.09.2025
