The Man With The Tan Skin Poem by Duy Bui

The night’s heavy thoughts stood soundlessly for a moment, just a short moment awkwardly between the crowd of excited subway riders,
and I in the midst of both. Thoughts and questions that I’ve asked, not yesterday but yesteryear and even farther beyond my present. recollection. These thoughts jumped on my inner canvas, like escapees slung from treetops, or launched from black water onto a passing train. They came when I first understood the name that my mother called, my name, not realizing at that very moment my existence has crossed over the threshold of a nameless universe, to join the mass of citizens, citizens of this impermanent world.
Tilting my head slowly toward mother’s voice while passionately playing with my toys; building my own world with plastic and metal toy cars, horses and knights, airplanes and rockets, all living and guarding the castle of legos of green, red and yellow citizens; they and time, moved in the sweeping waves of my eye. Everything was there. What wasn’t was not a loss; and what was lost was found again, reaching into the shadow of furniture where spiders, like me have built themselves a quiet world; no plentitude of light, but what was present was enough.

I looked around the subway car [on a recess from my thoughts] as it emptied inch by inch and realized, when staring hard into a person’s face for so long, that face would emerge out of the strange air that creeps over the self-hardened wall, standing over buried insecurities, desires, anxieties, and it would grow to be something of one’s familiarity; strangeness no more, only reposefulness.

I noticed a man with tan skin stooping a little, wearing a dusty, fainted blue hat whose rim pointed firmly toward the scratched and worn-out floor. Once in a while as passengers got on, the rim lifted before a smile he would pass, to greet their presence and a slight bow to the inner divinity. Did this man just finished a long day of work, and was on the way home to a waiting family? His grayish-white hair hung like clouds in the fading sunlight, yielding to the impending rain, sipping to the new day’s arrival; a youth spent, to harvest other youths, giving to impermanence.
Something inside me uttered an insightful reflection. It spoke ‘what stays between this very man and his children had grown beyond love’. Whatever it is, it kept his skin getting darker, his hair whiter, his voice sweeter and his smile wider. He has dodged not anytime in the comfortableness of his family, or flung any brimming nostalgia upon their shoulders. Time has carried him forward, in the expression of nature,
an essence of eternity; humbleness within impermanence.
Whatever it is, I have not yet fully comprehend.

The man with the tan skin smiled and bowed to me [my inner spirit] as he exited the train. People came and departed through the crashing doors, entering and exiting the busy world.
I stood in silence. “ONE SIXTEENTH STREET’ said the train operator.
It was my stop…….