I see, not feel, how beautiful they are! —Coleridge
For a long time I thought
I was special.
Out in the yard in my nightgown,
the moon threw its pole through my chest.
For a long time I felt
I had a long time.
Not like anyone else.
The ocean doesn't love me like it used to.
Nor, anymore, the moon.
They've passed, those days, and, painfully, my body, which has left me
clean and exhausted of
feeling, needing
only sleep.
But tonight in the crowded restaurant, while I sat for some time
without a beer, from the back of the place
came a plain-faced woman, the mother, it seemed, of many there.
She yanked by the sleeve a howling girl—up the aisle, past my legs, trouble at the heavy door—then out into the street.
We watched—all of us—through the coke-bottle windows—the girl
perform her rage. Spitting, kicking, slapping, punching: she gave it her worst, over and over, her own contorted cubist
face. This went on
uncomfortably long. We watched and didn't
eat. Until the woman (silent, from behind) caught her daughter like an animal,
pinned her arms with expertise, and crushed her
to her chest. Size then
before color
came out of the verge, and sat:
they swayed there awhile, back and forth, in full sight, up to the hips,
the woman saying something, something, the girl's body
almost limp—
Then we all turned back to our tables, the waitress
to her rush—
I felt something then
as I nearly do now, almost
a woman, an almost-feeling, that yearning to be (long-lost
by my mother) found again, in front of everyone, and crushed.