Sitting in a blue chair, her body warms
within a thin satin slip, as daylight widens over her and rolls
the shadows back across the moss brown carpet. A picture
of a fishing boat far out at sea hangs
above the dresser. On the room’s sole table, two books lie like heirlooms,
ages ago read. Gazing out the window, her chin rests in a palm, eyes
affixed, yet open; the bedspread is bunched at the iron end of an unmade bed.

Sometimes I notice, far up, the shadow of a hawk’s wing
gliding around the skyscrapers, above the rage
for new automobiles, and its razoring meander
reminds me of this women’s red hair
when she heads out, often late afternoon,
across from where I hawk the morning,
late-edition, and evening papers. Just now I glimpsed
a cresting wing disappear behind a skyscraper’s polished steel,
and again cry out, “Hoover’s Troops Run Out the Bonus Army!”
while she sits there, in her third-floor apartment, watching
without curtains the late morning light strengthen,
occasionally rising to disappear
into the arcana of her life.

Kept woman, escaped mother,
cloaked heiress, cardsharp or drifter,
new voter, army nurse on furlough, these labels
fly from her like pigeons
who have eaten all her crusts of bread.

Maybe one day I’ll offer her my name
as she steps past in a sharp hat as I caw the daily affairs. . . .
In this red brick building, I always see her alone,
my goddess, glinting vision, a universe.