In a Soho Café
This morning I become a woman who reads
poems in a Soho café. Cappucino and Edith Piaf,
oatmeal for an earthy touch. I watch
the somber child who watches me as she chews
bits of her father's muffin. In her long, pale dress
and lace-up boots, she is a tiny, delicate
Colombian doll. Her father, elegant in his pony-
tail, profile carved like a stone mask, eats
eggs so beautifully I could weep. And I would walk
right now into this meticulous Italian garden
mural. Just as I could have gone through
the leaded windows of a Russian antique shop
into a life with porcelain cups on painted tables,
ornate chairs, such velvet opulence that nothing
could reach me. Outside workers tear up the street
on their way to China, a giant face smirking
on a brick wall says nobody beats the Wiz, although Poe's
Prospero thought the same when he partied behind barred
doors. Death came at midnight, blood-spattered,
grimmer than we always hope. The child is having a birthday
and I am having surgery. In one hour I'll take my
valium with chicken soup. The waiter sings to the child
of years to come. The crowd applauds those times
New Yorkers don't get hit running against red lights.
Those crossings to prove again and again ordinary laws
don't hold us. Next week I could be in Rome
or in front of the Strand taking an egg-stained Daily News
from an old man who has given me all he has.
There's a woman with a unicorn,
like ones on fantasy books and posters.
But this woman is Medieval, she lives
on a Cluny tapestry, embroidered
silk and wool holding her tight,
tiny body, her lids lowered as her left hand
caresses the mane of her giant pet.
He smiles in a silly way, knowing he's
charming enough to be shallow,
rests his hooves on the underside of a scarlet
overskirt he's pulled up to her knees.
Her right hand holds a gilded mirror
so the unicorn can flirt with his more somber
self, not his flat, bejeweled mistress.
How she watches him! Disapproval, or lust?
(The two so often intertwined.) Is there,
at the corner of her thin lips,
an incipient smile? Or is this a didactic
moment: See how vain you are?
The unicorn's horn may look like a party hat
but it is huge, the maiden's golden tresses
ripple down her arched back,
and--most astonishing--her coronet of glistening
hair ends at the top of her head
in a goofy braid that stands straight up,
stiff as the unicorn's horn.
We were so high in Boise,
top floor of the green glass bank,
and the grave bank president who was justice
of the peace had no one to witness
our wedding. So we asked two
secretaries with bubble hair
polyeurethaned like bright smiles,
strangers who didn't know his mother
didn't approve, who didn't care that he wasn't
twenty-one, that I was older,
divorced, dressed in black,
my dark braid swinging at my waist
like a pull in a muffled bell.
He wore clean jeans, and after
we kissed, after he promised to love me
until our son was three,
we signed the book, went to the Five n' Ten
and bought white sneakers. Then we ate
at an All-You-Can-Eat pastrami joint with hats
and spurs on fake wood walls, drank beers on tap,
walked along the river rippling like an old mirror
in late afternoon sun. We leaned over to see
who we were. I heard the bell
tolling behind my heart, but it was
too early for endings. It would be five
years before he left our son and me dangling
at the top of a Berkeley ferris wheel.
After the play someone always asks
how much of what I wrote is real--
though sometimes they say true--
and I say some or none or all,
knowing they mean was that my life
up there under the lights. Yes,
all that I've imagined is, of course,
my life, but no more real than rain
falling on my hand as I wave to Teddy,
leaning out her window on MacDougal Street,
alive with lights and laughter, or the hot
scent of Mamoun's falafel, and no more true
than yesterday's news, wet and dirty
under our feet. The actors emerge, tired
and happy from creating lives, two hours
of reality, of truth for us and them
each night before we lose ourselves in smoke
and wine at Minetta Tavern, music
so loud we become mimes, abandoning
language, as in the end we must.
When you are under the house, fallen
down on one side, all supports
shattered by the earthquake
when you have just two inches to breathe
in moist, still-trembling earth as you
jack the foundation up in whispers
when there is only one other person
there beside you to hear ghostly footsteps
pacing through rubble upstairs
when you call from L.A. to tell me this
is your new job and sirens scream so fast
through the lines I cannot hear you,
it is no worse, I suppose, than when you
took my car and skidded through blaring snow,
music, laughter, crumpled near death
or when I found the razorblade,
scratched mirror in your desk and I kept
your list of names hidden under my skin,
it comes to this: I don't know if God
dies, but life now seems to be doled out
in years, days, moments of answering
the call that comes or does not,
a knowing slow as twilight
that I have no words, prayers to save you
although each dark morning I whisper
your name to the glacial air around my bed,
hearing those songs you once
sang to God in a language I loved but didn't
understand, please, feeling your small hand
in mine, oh, please, remembering my death.
--Donna Spector
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