Tag Archives: women
Zion 1
Women and car
We see only where we’ve been
Women swimming
They plunged deep in
out of the world
right in the middle of it
Of cats and secret codes
Would that women were so
open with their readiness, crying
“Come get me” in the night —
“Come get me” — while the
neighbors grumble, “What
is that?” and shut their windows
against the excess of need.
Man on the bus
Back when I worked at Charlie’s
on Broadway,
in Seattle not in New York,
I got it for once from both sides –
the dreamy looks and jokes,
the ever-in-my-section, thumb-rubbing-
fingers like the promise of money –
and the thing itself – big tips and a
206- just for being me.
The money part’s the part that made me not
mind it overly much – though I’d hustle in and out
when it was a group of guys,
with their hush-before-arrival and
giggle-when-I-was-gone.
They could hope for their
“maybe later at the–”
where I’d never ever be. And so
it was nothing, nothing at all
until one day on the bus I
looked at a girl and she looked at me
till she looked away uncomfortably
and got off the bus.
Only then did I recall
the man who’d scared me off
with that same hunger on that same bus,
and thus became clear
what was ever clear to a girl:
Men will ever be menacing,
and I will ever be of them.
As night falls pregnant woment
As night falls pregnant women
exercise in the park and parents
clean the classrooms of the school
(with buckets and rags, I remember
how that was). It’s all green now,
every tree is filled with multiple
shades of dark green, the delicate
dusty pale pink has left us.
I wonder how soon I will see
the change again – the yet darker and fuller
giving way to the first gold.
Sooner than I think tonight, surely.
But happily, this easy arc of color
has no true downside.