- The merwoman leaves the bistro,
- bids goodnight to her companions,
- and turns the corner for the short walk home.
- Rapid steps behind her
- blow sets her reeling
- briefcase, bag ripped away.
- Someone is making eerie
- high pitched sounds.
- She hears calls and responses
- she cannot decode.
- Blue-jeaned legs piston
- into the park
- glistening wrench
- lies in the lamplight.
- Windows and doors fly open
- and she is on a stoop,
- hands patting, quilt covering,
- a cloth filled with ice offered.
- She does not understand.
- All around her there are socks.
- No one has stopped for shoes.
- “The cops are coming.”
- “Did anyone see him?”
- “Don’t try to stand up.”
- Her pale coat blackening,
- the ice is guided to the side
- of her head by a warm hand.
- “Hold it there. To deaden the pain.”
- But there is no pain. At dinner, there was pain
- in the talk of Three Mile Island spewing radiation,
- of sending her children out of the city
- so she would know that they were safe
- if an evacuation began.
- Talk too of Holly’s battered body
- found in gentle Ira’s trunk,
- Pain then, huge and dark,
- had hollowed away her presence,
- drawing into that void the denimed thief
- who chose her of all the Westsiders
- leaving a bistro on a warm spring evening.
- Now the dark is dispelled
- by the lights pouring from windows,
- by the hands reaching out to her,
- by the people of West 83rd caring that someone
- has wounded a woman they do not know.
- Genovese died in another borough.
- The merwoman will live.
