Madame Tuesday

You want to write a poem about that old lady you saw
on the subway yesterday but the strange May air
of New York City afternoon keeps
up such hybrid bright disarming
humid undecided light
you cannot bring sufficient focus
to that locus, or indeed quite any
point at all: as if some creature larger
than the smearing pearly and translucent

sky that you espy now crawling over everything
had gently jiggled every swig and ligature of the expanding
signature of this metropolis so that not one thin line of it
was legible: and you reflect
again on that old lady on the subway and her intermittent
shuffling observations which she seemed to think
could only be reported from the seat beside the side of you –
that Lincoln, next to Washington and Roosevelt,
had had the hardest job, and had you

noticed there was no one on the train as old as she?
Plastic-bagged belongings
of some sort were neatly packed into
a carryall that leaned against her knee, and when you glanced
above you saw a face as wrinkled and as warty
as a children’s goblin book: you didn’t want to take another look.
Somehow the notion that there isn’t any time
is now the only thought you can retain:
both that there’s no such thing,

and that her life like yours and everyone’s
is on the rapid wane. Ah! – now you ascertain, and understand:
the creature in whose hand this city
wriggled and demanded freedom yesterday
was that old lady on the subway: Madame Tuesday –
ancient pearly third of New York’s seven daily patron saints:
cast from all the blur of its expository paints:
bleeding colors of a bright and humid undecided light.
Ephemerally memorable sight.


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