Given your red eyes, grizzled cheek,
——the boozy scent coming off your skin,
you probably forgot the young woman
——at the steep subway entrance you bummed
a cigarette from, how between her baby
——crying and the stroller sprung open,
she just handed you the pack, said, Keep it;
——probably forgot how you stepped back,
eyed the situation, lit two, put one in her mouth
——and the pack back in her shirt pocket,
saying, Honey, you need them more than me.
——But could you forget grabbing her
just as she tripped, with a crowd pushing
——from behind so fast she would have toppled
down those stairs, baby and all? No time
——to think, it must have been pure instinct,
which is a kind of memory. And about
——that young woman, shaken, sobbing into
your reeking tweed like a fatherless child—
——no matter who else you might have left
unfathered, mis-fathered, you were fathering her.
——Years ago. Somehow the baby stopped crying,
the stroller got folded, and what was it like
——holding that young woman—did it bring
back some lost life, or give you pleasure
——at saving hers? I’ll never know
if you drank it all away, ended up unnamed,
——frozen under a bridge, or maybe sober
in a halfway house, telling others
——around a circle, It’s all right, you’ll make it.
Those words, that gritty whisper—
——you were the most real person in the city
that day, and for all I cannot know,
——I do know the feel of that cigarette’s
wet filter in my mouth and the strength
——of your grip pulling me out of the crowd,
and how you didn’t let go as I cried
——into your shoulder’s rough wool,
how you fingered my son’s bare baby foot
——as if the amazement was all on your side.

 

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Betsy Sholl’s eleventh book of poems, Mercy (Slant), is forthcoming. If a Song Could Save You (Wisconsin) appeared in 2022. She is faculty emerita at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

 
Image: Diego Marín. Unsplash, 2019.