ride and ride and ride

Today the sun is back. I’m a bit sad about it, in truth. Yesterday afternoon, when the dark clouds came, it was such a reprieve from all of this sun and heat. I looked at the weather report online and the picture above each day this week had a dark cloud blowing and a little stick of yellow lightning poking through the air. But yesterday was the only storm.

I read Anne Sexton’s letters recently and keep going back to them. There is something so special in her words. I flip through the pages, and, to borrow from her own sentiment, she comes at me from the page and grows like a bone inside of my heart. She has really been a quiet companion to me these days, and I wish I could offer more truth than that, but it’s more the feeling, like someone is drinking you maybe.

Karen Kovacik wrote a poem about my picture from above. It’s going to be in her new book, I think.

Woman at Streetcar Stop, St. Charles Line, New Orleans

Gone are the feathered masks of Mardi Gras,
gone, too, the Krewe of Zulu tossing coconuts
to revelers. It’s June, unending month of sweat
which glues her hair like chicken down
to her forgotten neck. Her shirtwaist –shirred
brown jersey knit –conceals a bladder pad
and crinkly arms. She’s maybe fifty-five,
her butt a flabby saddle no one wants
to grab, though fifteen years before, I’ll bet
her swell of ass commanded stares,
and earlier still, those heavy hips shook babies free.
So what if assholes call her “hag” or “crone?”
I’m forty-four. To me, she’s harbinger,
wherever she is headed: grocery store or HMO
or church named for the saint
who sang Last Rites to victims of the plague.
I’m off to tour the Cities of the Dead,
but first I watch her haul herself aboard
the trolley car, calves sculpted still, purse smashed
against her chest. I’d guess she’s fifty-five.
And when some stranger offers her his seat,
she settles in to ride and ride.