Cry (poem)
Cry
Floating below the wharf, he raps twice overhead
With the handle of a hand-net, the stranger with no shoes
And raffia hat, ambered at the crown with sweat
Summoning his awkward date
“Doesn’t matter,” is what he murmurs
She has let a nervous laugh escape
Forcing her to listen through a knothole, kneeling
Like a cookie’s fortune, through this whistle stop
stabs up a paper rolled around another thing
a plastic vial and tiny chip
If she can contrive it…and she must
she will brush this in her handbag
with all she’d feigned to spill
Should not have worn a dress…she tells herself this
but it’s hard to know in a tourist town, odd clothes and clumsy speech
the false note more blasé
The slightly false, though, too much purpose in the wrong place…
She looks at everything, catches a heel, walks her weight
on her toes, slow, coming from the waterfront, past restaurants
All alike with open bars, advertising neon, cocoanutty marimba
Don’t be tense, she tells herself
Buy a tee shirt
Hobble your left arm with another shopping bag
Buy a drink that has a straw
Sip and stump along and stall
Finally surprise comes, and she thinks goddamn
Her knee truly skinned
The mind wanders
She’d been drinking Coke. “You’re all right? You’re all right?”
There is that too. The role she has to act.
“I don’t know what I’ll do…my passport…all my money.”
Cry…she tells herself, and can’t. She never could.
Narrowing the Path
(2017, Stephanie Foster)