Marie

MARIE:
Maven of the seven steps
near the Times Square Subway.
Standing 5 foot 4.
Shortened by her train dusted,
wrinkly polyester moo-moo
to an illusionary 4 foot 11.
Her chubby liver spotted hand on rail?body vacillating
with the rush of tunnel wind,
she sings of blue bells
and gentleman callers
from another lifetime-
for dirty change or singles.
Her eyes must be gray
with Athena-like wisdom?

Yet, just as one nods into her subway mantra she squawks,
" I live in F L U S H I N G !"
Startled by her proclamation, waiting passengers begin to look at me as
a hausfrau?
Coifed in day one
of my two-week-old attire.

Because I didn't sweep her away with the subway rats,
with the crumpled headlines and chewed apple cores rotting
on the tracks,
with the sound of impatient feet,
shuffling by as I waited?
Because to me she isn't invisible.

They say if you live in New York long enough then
homeless people become invisible -- Marie is homeless.
Not homeless with lack of 4 walls, under one water-stained roof, in a
rent controlled building on the outskirts of Flushing?

But destitute with belief,
Belief that home is where the heart is--(you will find hers somewhere
on the platform steps between Flushing and Times Square.)

She has no love.
No person waiting with a
Shar Pei-like, crinkled
face of worry if
she hobbles through the door
alone at 2 am.

No one has talked to her.
The passengers are full of their own assumptions.
Marie is homeless -- To them, Marie is invisible.
She breathes air, just as the earth burns, like an ant
under God's magnifying glass?
Just as the tides deceive us
with whispered heartache.

She chortles into the silence?chronically folding a napkin in her
arthritic hands, "I remember drinking the Devil's Juice in the crab
orchards in Nova Scotia! I made sweet memory moments over Oreos and ice
water in the field that day with my one true love! Do you have
one?
You deserve love, honey,
I bet it chases you, I bet it does!"

At this moment,
when my train arrives?
I imagine myself
as a graceful ballerina,
spinning with my arms
raised high above my head?towards the heavens?
So completely fixated
on the beauty
of the red starlight,
(That is Marie)
that I twirl right off ?
the front of the stage.