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.