When I had a job I went to by bus
every morning,
one of my fantasies was to get off
at any of the intermediate stops
and never arrive —
to stay and enjoy the morning in that square
ringed with trees,
to slip into a café already emptied
of the rush hour and eat a plate of churros
behind its windows,
and watch the passers-by on the other side
with the peace of distance,
and then browse the magazines
at the kiosk, sit on a bench to read a book,
peer into the windows of the hardware shops
(at eleven in the morning, there are few things
more beautiful than the window of a hardware shop),
and afterwards walk down the street
along a stretch of sunlit lanes and narrow pavements
between distant avenues,
go into any shop, fill out a football pools coupon
to win money without working,
go into a bookshop (back when they existed)
or a comic-book shop and browse
the illustrated pages of books I will never read,
and then pass by the train station
and watch the trains coming and going,
and the people getting on and off.
And to imagine — where are they going?
Where are they coming from?
Whom do they love?
And not to try to answer
those questions, only to let them
go hopping off
like sparrows on the asphalt
in search of the bread someone tosses.

The world then emerges from order
as a new miracle,
an untraced path
that can only be walked
with no heading at all.

Everything Should Be Free, LXI p. 74