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Three Women in a Brownstone; Apartment # 202
I. An Immigrant 1924-1965
Katarine, nineteen year old It Girl, Clara Bow eyes
sepia skin , and lanolin hair that wraps the salt air
snug against her cheek. One battered cardboard
suitcase over-stuffed with pearl white hope.
Twenty-four newly minted American dollars
enough to buy Manhattan, dour Ellis Island
shoots a cursory glance, knows what she will find.
Two-thousand letters, scribbled Cyrillic on butcher paper
hand stamped by Postmaster McDevitt, IRA lieutenant.
Folk songs to empty cradles, on one-coal winter nights
waking to the tubercular cough of her husband drowning
in coke ovens; his ashes on the mantle, tarnished crucifix,
faded postcard wedding portrait, souvenir of a boat trip.
II. A Teacher 1966-1997
Jackie, with dew-dropped blue eyes,
crush of lilacs scent her hair, chalkdust
skims the delicate calico folds of her dress.
The patient curve of her unmade mouth
whispers a song to first grade valentines
on her refrigerator, crooked alphabet poems.
Summer bus tours, alone with Irish brogues,
day trips to the Louvre, pictures for class.
She reads Bronte, cries at the sad parts,
wants to wring words from the blackboard
spin them into stories she can call her own.
Sleeps with her hair down; wakes, restless
in quiet autumn to the sound of playgrounds.
III. An Artist 1997-1999
Meg has chrome eyelashes, burnt red hair
and a knowing look that pirouettes about her lips.
On charcoal nights she draws me like water
from the well of her pallete, washes the canvas.
Pastel nights she’s a cat poised in Circe’s lap,
tilts her head and listens to the city stretch and yawn
until the horizon is a thin copper eggshell.
On pinto gray afternoons she paints children
Sunday school yellow in oval gardens ripe
with tulips, shaded by lavender elms in summer.
Today she chooses to drive broad brush-strokes
of porcelain blue, carnival red; north on I-35, until
the sun’s overworn legs unfold like an easel in the west.
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