59.
May 5, 2009
Heaving coo, a woman moaning, stout body writhing – the sound, a disjointed image of sleep. Coming to, shading sun from crusted eyes, it is morning. The woman momentarily falls quiet and I am left looking round the room for evidence of her, her ghost gone.
The cracked window spilling fresh spring air is a speaker box clue: blaring her purr, distorting the ruffle of her clothing flapped loose.
Standing at the sill, I stare out onto the balcony but cannot find her in the filter of early morning light. A dream figment, faded.
About to turn from my windowed reflection, I see her scuttling, her fat body edging the old apartment brick.
Dressed in moulted blue-grey finery, her nose a cere of soft fleshy swelling, she collects the flimsy night sticks and dusty day old trash blown over the parking lot concrete. Holding them carefully in her mouth, she is greedy.
The descendent of the great figments of war and peace, she is not the product of her genes: she cannot race, she cannot carry; she is not a messenger nor a passenger; she won’t detect nor save.
Her great, great grandfather puffed up his chest, a cog integral to the machinery of the 72 lofts of the Battle of Marne; the grandfather before him, a peaceful conciliator delivering olive branch signals of landlocked safety following the flood.
A forgotten shame of her lineage, she floats from dumpster to dumpster, her next meal an a la carte menu of half-wrapped three-day stale burgers and rotting tin can residue pecked out of kitchen catchers. Her waste, the trace she leaves behind, has the acidic corrosiveness capable of eroding metal, eating stone. She is dirty, she is sad: she is the didus ineptus of downtown.
A superstitious lady, she makes the same rounds each day, bobbing her head up, down, up, down asking passersby to take pity, to throw her just a crumb, not realizing superstition is only the repetition of an action with no influence over desired outcome.
Pipio! I call over the balcony. Pausing, she looks up, cocks her head left, then right. On the breath of the wind, she escapes down the alleyway in flight to haunt another ornithophobic.
xoxo
M.L. H’art
