MARCH '79 WEST 83RD

Screen Shot 2022-01-31 at 4.16.25 PM.png
  • The merwoman leaves the bistro,
  • bids goodnight to her companions,
  • and turns the corner for the short walk home.
  • Rapid steps behind her
  • blow sets her reeling
  • briefcase, bag ripped away.
  • Someone is making eerie
  • high pitched sounds.
  • She hears calls and responses
  • she cannot decode.
  • Blue-jeaned legs piston
  • into the park
  • glistening wrench
  • lies in the lamplight.
  • Windows and doors fly open
  • and she is on a stoop,
  • hands patting, quilt covering,
  • a cloth filled with ice offered.
  • She does not understand.
  • All around her there are socks.
  • No one has stopped for shoes.
  • “The cops are coming.”
  • “Did anyone see him?”
  • “Don’t try to stand up.”
  • Her pale coat blackening,
  • the ice is guided to the side
  • of her head by a warm hand.
  • “Hold it there. To deaden the pain.”
  • But there is no pain. At dinner, there was pain
  • in the talk of Three Mile Island spewing radiation,
  • of sending her children out of the city
  • so she would know that they were safe
  • if an evacuation began.
  • Talk too of Holly’s battered body
  • found in gentle Ira’s trunk,
  • Pain then, huge and dark,
  • had hollowed away her presence,
  • drawing into that void the denimed thief
  • who chose her of all the Westsiders
  • leaving a bistro on a warm spring evening.
  • Now the dark is dispelled
  • by the lights pouring from windows,
  • by the hands reaching out to her,
  • by the people of West 83rd caring that someone
  • has wounded a woman they do not know.
  • Genovese died in another borough.
  • The merwoman will live.