imagine a woman...

look through the hair
in your face
or wild fennel
to that bench on the hill
see there the book on her lap
how the sun rolls off her skin
when she turns the pages
that purple sweater
and bits of newspaper or birds
gusted up over her head
and now imagine she sees you
up over the fence or through the car
window wherever you happen to be
and that she mistakes you for an old man
with a pipe or perhaps a piece of grass
used like a toothpick and remembers
the time in the basement
ten maybe twelve years ago
when her grandfather nearly cut off
the tip of his finger with a table saw
and at that moment had become so small
that she almost stepped on him
reaching to turn off the power
but instead had scooped him up
to recover in the folds of her
sweater until dinner time and now
start to hum something old
some bluesy notes written across
the wind patsy cline maybe and see
if she turns grows larger changes
her position or stays bent
over that page hearing instead
the creak of a window
raised a little higher and a curtain
pushed aside a kitchen radio
and doesn't notice how the music floats
into the room rather than out
and that there's someone in a yellow dress
who catches those notes
little paper airplanes
and stirs them up like a woman
with a broom and that it is not
actually a kitchen but a bedroom
from which the lover of the man
in the yellow dress has just left
to stroll down the hill
and gather up the white dog
stretched across the bench turning
now and then in its sleep
beside the purple flowers

ãElizabeth Terry
9/9/1993