We were singing along to the same old tune

I thought I was in a Christmas movie. When I got on, a veteran in a black peacoat was talking to the bus driver about 9/11 and the attacks that are going to come within the next five years, all at once, like a string of firecrackers, in every major city in the U.S., and how no one is prepared, no one believes anything could happen to them; it makes him sick, how much they don't understand. I couldn't tell if he meant civilians or general complacency. I was working on a poem I had printed out, bashing my head against a stanza I wouldn't get right until sometime after midnight. By the next stop, he was talking across the aisle to the woman who sat in front of me, in the first row of seats; I heard the bases and cities where he had been stationed and then suddenly, "I went to Bethlehem. Where Jesus was born. It was beautiful." He had a soldier's high crew-cut, the dark flat brown that in oblique light or overcast looks like graphite; the dry texture of his skin did not match his age, the very fine lines around his mouth and forehead. I shouldn't have flashed on Cadfael, but he was describing the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and I thought of pilgrimages, soldier-saints, crusades. They spoke of his parents, what he could barely afford to give them: with absolute assurance, the woman told him, "You're their Christmas present."—"I'm certainly my mother's, the way she won't let go of me . . ." Later he shifted up to the front of the bus to stand with his arms crossed, even when the bus swayed and stopped and started again, and tell the driver about IEDs and his friend who died. I don't know if this sounds like a Christmas movie. The season wants stories; we can invent them out of a sentence and a half and the cold absence of taste in the air that means coming snow. Christmas in the trenches. Home for the holidays. All I want for Christmas is you. If he had never mentioned Bethlehem or presents, I don't know. I was reminded of H.D.'s "R.A.F.," where an angel of annunciation can be an airman with a stammer—what does this visitor portend? He said goodbye to the driver, got off in Arlington Center. He was so much younger than I am.