Looking at her (after the accident)
November 5, 2010
Some days, I can’t find a poetic half-thought – too much life piled into a morning, too much to think about and react to and too many things to which I ought to pay attention. So, finding and crafting a poem is just about impossible. Today was one of those days. On the way to work, I was “the” accident on 97th Street. Three cars. I was the front. I watched in my rear view mirror as the hood popped off the car that did the ramming. She was, apparently, watching the flashing lights of a police car at the side of the road – he’d pulled a car over for being in the bus lane – and never even touched her brakes. Hardly any damage to the Mitsubishi – some scrapes and dints on the bumper. But I’m a little stiff. My back is tender. I made it to my meeting just in time. But today is “sorbet” day – the day I send out a poem to the people on my sorbet list. Starting with the truth is always a good idea, yes? Here it is:
Looking at her
Can’t find poetry today. I’ve looked everywhere. I’ve made space, put out
welcome mats, baked pies, considered wine at 9 a.m. and tried to fall in love.
I’ve looked in all the usual places – called out in the discombobulated darkness – “Hello? Hello?” But poetry didn’t answer. On the way to work, I thought perhaps it was hiding behind a tree – a beautiful open-armed elm. But no. Rough bark in stasis. Then I tried to read it on a bus-stop bench sign – but it was only a car advertisement. If I stop, I thought, and look up into the sky, surely the crystalline blue will inscribe a verse or two, a stanza, a line, a word. I’d even take a bad rhyme. But the sky was dull grey leaning toward a grey infinity. And this grey was reflected in the door of a Starbucks on 102 Avenue.
And your Starbucks barista smiles and wishes you a good day but you can see that she smiles while her heart is breaking. She hands you your coffee and hesitates a fraction of a moment of a hidden moment. She looks across the counter and you know she does not like herself – she believes she’s too fat, not smart, too large in the hips – and her last boyfriend hit her, hard – every weekend after drinking too much goddamned rye – and eventually, she believed she deserved to be hit – that it wasn’t Roy’s fault – because in bed, there were certain things she would not do, for him – and she wasn’t a great cook – like his mother – and now she’s alone and she feels terribly alone, except when she’s at work – smiling and making coffee
for customary strangers.
And there’s the poem. Not in your speculation. Not in your imagined tragic narrative. But inside the moment of a fragmented moment of a wish to connect beyond every too-human assumption.
She hesitated and caused you to look up,
at her.