The Bag Lady
She sat outside the coffee shop elbows
propped up on a small circular blue metal table
with a frosted glass top, starring intently
at morning traffic and passersby.
A partially eaten pastry on a paper napkin
like an island in a sea of blue.
I had seen her face before, in the park the winter last.
It was her, the bag lady. She had emerged like
an insect from dead leaves into the new light
of spring, except the wheeled cart that
held the big black plastic bag of packed-down clothes
that always followed her like a big black dog,
had been replaced by a smaller plastic bag
no bigger than a well-fed cat. It was spring,
she was traveling light.
Her streaked gray hair radiated wildly
about her head for who knows how long.
Two wrinkled jowls sagged on either side of her face.
Her small, fiercely blue eyes had lost nothing
of their feral brightness or penetration
as she sipped coffee and blew cigarette smoke into
the air, mixing with car exhaust fumes.
There was this one exception about her
and markedly so. Her countenance: it had been freed,
perhaps only temporarily, of the remoteness
it had worn that winter day when I had first seen her.
It now expressed a sense of well-being,
newly acquired, as though her life had changed,
and its weight had lightened, perhaps by
the kindness or generosity of a friend
or a softhearted stranger. It didn’t matter.
She seemed almost to be experiencing a rare windfall
of happiness, summed up in coffee, pastry, and cigarettes.
All this went through my mind as I walked by her
and entered the coffee shop for my usual regular, extra lite, no sugar.
As I left, coffee in hand, I turned briefly
for a final look. An elderly man had joined her.
I held back from speculating, yet in a strangely
remote way I was happy for her. She would have
wanted it that way, I wanted to believe.
Copyright © Maurice Rigoler | Year Posted 2023
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