MOVING DAYThey arrive on Saturday and haul into the sun the evidence of your hidden life: a 1950s wood-paneled Sentinel TV set with the tubes exposed in back a metal desk as heavy as a rhino a Westinghouse refrigerator with the door removed lamps and tables in a style no one remembers decorative platters commemorating county fairs where you must have twirled in a red-checkered skirt knees and ankles glinting like hubcaps on a brand new Desoto lace curtains yellowed by the smoke you must have smoked at cocktail parties martini sloshing in hand as you wafted from room to room a blue morpho butterfly in a vanished rainforest ~ how you came to be the little old hunched lady with two dangling front teeth and 9 feral cats is one of the mysteries of our neighborhood where you are now is a deeper mystery still. NAME THEMthe fallen iris petal is roughly the shape of a cut-out light bulb wet after the rain heavy as purple in my palm i don't have proper words for the fuzzy yellow vertical ridge at its base nor for the spray of fountain grass stenciled on either side of the ridge as if the flower had drawn a neighboring scene onto itself as it sprang from the stem a botanist i am not consider me Adam after the first rain when petals bloomed and fell faster than he and Eve could name them ANOTHER MONDAYCafe at a bend in the road, car after car slowing to bank from sunlight into shade, carrying scribbled Sunday shopping lists, mud-splattered bicycles, lovers, wives, husbands, dogs and kids around the curve of noon into the chute of another week. My company's CEO died in his sleep last night at age 60. He will never face another Monday. THE LADY AT THE CORNER TABLEMy wife and I first saw her years ago at our favorite cafe tumbleweed of grey-black hair cliff-dwelling eyes looking out from a corner table on a busy Saturday morning she'd wait for it noisily plunking her bag of books and papers as close as she could get asking-- at the slightest rustle of napkins or scrape of cups-- "Are you done with that table?" then happily grounded in the corner she'd scan the room like a buzzard looking for interlopers while guarding her scrap of dead meat. * The cafe eventually closed we wandered for months looking for a worthy replacement with good coffee fresh pastries and that indefinable Something then one morning we saw her at Caffe Trieste camped in the corner scarfing a sesame bagel with cream cheese her eyes flinging spears at parents of young children plates and cups in hand desperate for a free table and we knew that this must be the place. HUNGERLike air from a tire
warmth has gone out of the afternoon the blinds are drawn walls grey moving toward black and I remember how it feels to be young and friendless marooned on a twin mattress in a strange city cockroaches crawling from under the toaster oven whenever I turn it on.
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