Woman on a Street in Beaufort

A piano never played

for her,

no silk-covered buttons

clasped her cotton dresses

closed.

Beneath sagging Spanish moss

she stands, September sun

cutting patches of her

shoulder skin into light

and dark geometry,

warming her faded frock,

extinguishing the tiny purple flowers

that used to leap and swing

when her legs moved.

She heaves her weight

to one hip and squints

at the ladies passing by

in heels and bright lipstick,

watches closely while

the silk of their skirts

brushes against their slender

calves, and daydreams

about their lives.

She imagines

them in three-story

brick-stepped homes, with

careless palm leaves waving

from beside a lazy pool,

and wonders what perfumes

and gems they adorn their tiny necks

with as they’re getting ready

for a night out in Charleston –

imagines the long luxurious

cars they slip into, off to

maybe a movie after

dinner in a glitzy, glowing

restaurant that requires

reservations,

or a gallery of art, filled

with paint and wine

and opinions,

or to an even larger home

filled with couples,

arm in arm,

and she knows

no matter where they go

they go with spontaneity,

with flowers and promises –

something there had been

none of for her.

There was never any hurried

getting ready, no call

to say, “the driver will be

there at six o’clock,”

no reason to reach to the back

of her closet and get her

good dress out.

There was only the

sameness of her cracked piece

of sidewalk, under the skirts

of Spanish moss

hanging from a peering oak,

the one witness

to her solitude, to

that stifling night

some thirty years ago.

There had been only sameness

in her every day,

her voiceless cries — which had

eventually stopped-

what’s the point?

and even all her bruises

wound up in the same

sunken spots, like

he had beat the protest

out of her skin.

There had been

the two of them,

and once, almost

three, until he took that

out of her, too.

But that all changed one night

beneath a mute black moon,

beside the crooked oak out back,

and no dog had howled,

and no neighbors had heard –

and then, when it was over,

her life became a

stillness.

Her days were

as routine as roots

that grow beneath the trees and

hold the ground together,

as routine as roots

curling around her

husband’s bones, deep

beneath the shade

of the oak leaves and moss.

The sun shifts behind a

fat cloud and the women

walking by

turn their corner, laughing,

and in the absence of any promises

and the absence of any rain

she moves her feet, and lifts

her head,

and goes inside again.