A woman walks down the street
Fanning her sweaty face—
In the suburban US,
They’re now a people apart,
The scattered pedestrians,
Mostly alone on sidewalks
Beside the rushing traffic
Of the normal denizens
In their private vehicles—
Most of what you see you fail
To notice well—the woman
With her piece-of-paper fan
That can’t much be helping her
Has fallen behind your car
And it’s up to memory,
Now, in memory’s surreal
Fashion, to preserve, to hold
Fast that juxtaposition
Between person and pavement.
You pour yourself another
Memory of days you lived
The same juxtaposition,
The times you walked suburban
Streets by yourself, no other
Pedestrians, expecting
A squad car any second—
The exhaustion, the aching,
The vulnerability—
Above all, the emptiness,
The emptiest possible
Emptiness, that of a scene
Designed for some busy kind
Of humanness turned waste land.
It was so satisfying,
At least when weather obliged,
To feel the human absence,
And so terrifying, worse
Than being lost in a crowd,
To be the only body
Without a shell in a world
Of sealed-up, tinted monsters
That could kill you if they cared.
All of this you’ve projected
On that sight of one woman
Walking while fanning her face,
The shame of observation
Being that it saves itself
In the shell of the observed.
