(no subject)

Sat on a bench tonight on the way home from doing some tutoring with a young man who writes very beautiful poems. The bus pulled up, and the windows and the light gave everyone's faces the most vivid immediacy, specificity, and beauty for the moment it was at the stop. A plump young woman in a tight blue sweater and jeans hurried to the front of the bus, but didn't get off. When the bus was gone, the streetlight behind the leaves of the tree above me made them translucent in the dark, and they took on the same qualities of starkness and beauty as the faces on the bus.

As I tried to describe it just now, it reminded me of an Ezra Pound poem -- something like

A face
glimpsed in a train station
leaves against
a damp, black bough.