Same Stop

All September we were coats and phone-glow at the stop, the 7:10 a lit box we climbed into out of the dark.

This Monday the hour has come back and there they are: the woman with the cello case is younger than her voice on the phone, the man who always coughs wears a red scarf, darned at one end, and the boy from the third floor has grown a moustache, or nearly.

Nobody says anything. We look a little, the way you look at a room where someone moved the chairs, and the tram comes, grey under grey, and we get on in the order we always do.

By five the dark will have us back for the ride home. It doesn't matter. The scarf is red.