(After Schiller’s ‘A Maid From Afar’)

By the filling station on La Cienega a burger joint

somehow survives. This Sunday morning

a pink Thunderbird sags at the kerb,

and an old Studebaker, paint flaking.

Suzy got a job waitressing there, she doesn’t quite

remember how or when. She turns up for work

just as the first bus trundles by, shifting gears

at the corner, the double diesel’s throaty roar

making the plate glass tremble and glitter.

She didn’t come from around there – nobody did.

‘I left the Midwest – don’t ask me when,’

she said once. This morning she gets the key

and goes to the john. The empty sky

has that pale hazy look that means a hot day.

I like it when she stops to talk awhile.

She brings a second cup of coffee, and

‘You should try the espresso,’ she says. ‘God,

I could do with a drink.’ But with the boss watching

she makes sure to smile at the customers:

old Ed with yesterday’s paper, the bag lady

from down at the Marina, who used to be

a Hospitality Executive, if you can believe that,

even that wasted couple in the corner

rubbing their arms and not noticing anything:

not the spilled milk, not the cigarette burning down

between the girl’s fingers, not even the view

through the speckled window: the hills

covered with dry scrub, and in the parking lot

a cop checking out their rusting car

and talking on the radio. I can’t stand

losers like that. ‘They just got married,’ Suzy whispers,

wiping the counter and looking over her shoulder at them.

Then she takes the little vase of flowers from

next to the cash register and puts it on their table –

and of course they don’t notice, the girl biting her nails,

the guy staring into his plate – some daisies

that she’d picked from a neighbour’s yard

and a sprig of freesias the colour of cream and butter

whose dreamy scent competes with coffee and gasoline.