Reverie

Ever seen someone who just looked like they belonged to a different era? She’s like that.  Every movement carries delicacy and I’d rather cut than to say a coarse word in her earshot. She walks like a waltz and her gaze like a forbidden secret, one that your father hasn’t told you about yet regarding women and the way they make you feel.  Yet, she’s not terribly ethereal.  Garish taxi-cab yellow polish tries in vain to hide gnawed out stubs of nails. Her flaxen hair just adds to the way her brown eyes claw at you.  She makes you exhale the way you gasp when walking into those old law libraries, rows upon rows of books; tile after tile, feeling like you’re looking into eternity, and you remember to breathe only since you’re about to pass out and the spots come out across your eyes. Have to touch, have to reach out, see if she’s really there; perhaps a vision, a fantasy, an Angel. Just as I’ve memorized her every fiber and cell, she’s slipping away from me, weaving between the crowds with the ease of a creek between boulders. But she’s weaving me behind, floating through the crowds on the subway platform. Then, then she’s just gone. Perhaps an angel.

Back to me, my dragging raincoat and battered briefcase. I only ground myself to the spot on the platform just to keep from being pushed over the edge onto the rails, and I can’t but help and believe that the Angel would come back, and I could gaze at her one more time. Never enough, though as much as I want it. And what could she want with something disgustingly wretched like me? Angels don’t get involved with us, do they? They’re there with God, doing His better Will and we’re just milling around down below hoping for the most minor of crumbs to fall from the manor-owner’s table. No, the lovely angelic sight won’t be around until she’s needed to whisk me away.  Better for me to be taken when my lungs are clogged and cackle like an old hag under the chains of emphysema, and my hair natty and gray. At that time, wouldn’t I be wandering though – lost in another time and completely unaware of my surroundings? I’ll be like my Angel, from another time and place with only a few traces of the times to bring someone back out of reverie.