Saturday, January 13, 2018

Tillie

Steel-town Tillie
was my first bag lady.
As a child I trailed her,
just out of reach
of the miasma of sour milk
and spoiled meat.

She stopped before the five-and-dime
to comb her thinning hair,
mouse brown now streaked
with yellow-white
no manner of primping
could beautify.

She had a Hepburn face,
high cheekbones.
She’d stop in every doorway
to see herself mirrored
and re-arrange her scarf.

Dogs sniffed the oily stains
that marked her bundles and rags.
Starving birds pecked
at the trail of crumbs,
burst buttons and candy wraps,
the lengths of multi-colored thread
that dropped through her
bottomless pockets.

Don’t ask her age, how many
winters she’d tramped the streets —
how many weddings and funerals
she’d watched, like the uninvited fairy
from the shadowed, latter-most pew.
(She had a wedding once, they say.
Asked where her husband is,
folks look away.)

She’d talk, if you ask,
of her house on the hill —
new furniture just in,
painting in progress,
wallpaper sample books
thumbed through.
She doubled back
when no one watched
to the abandoned car
by the railroad tracks,
where she slept,
cradling her packages
like swaddled infants.

Year by year
she was gaunter, thinner.
Finally, they cornered her,
shoved her screaming
into an ambulance.

Word spread around town
of an abscess gone wild,
a hole in Tillie’s neck
where everything she drank
gushed out as from
a cartoon bullet hole.

They paused in the taverns,
in the vomit-scented Moose Hall,
with litanies of “Tillie, poor Tillie!”
On side streets,
her shadow shambled without her,
frail as a moth wing,
picked apart by moonlight,
scattered by cicadas,
waiting to reassemble
if she returned
to her appointed rounds.


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