Philadelphia, November 1976

Into the ice-edged darkness, my husband
and I hurried in the weak light of jaundiced
lanterns. Chestnut vendors huddled
into themselves, their fiery coals hissing.

Wind howled as we turned
the corner on Walnut Street, ripped off my hand-
loomed scarf  and sent it flying.
I didn’t know it was gone
until I heard the voice,
a wailing cry in the night.
A woman crouched over the grate,
my red silk
scarf thrashing
from a withered hand.
Unkempt, her face was pocked and ridged
with wrinkles. Garments of neglect hung
on the skeletal frame as she hovered in the warmth
of the manhole’s rising steam. We stopped,
uncertain. She grabbed the hem of my coat.
Fear met the madness of her roving eye.

In the shelter of our car, she spoke to us
of art and architecture, insisted that her son was
a great industrial artist.
We talked close to an hour before we scrunched
bills into her hand, gave her our address
and drove away. She bent back into the black
starless night and we re-entered our comfortable life.

Months later, a police captain called
to tell us she was dead,
our name in her pocket,
the only clue to her life. A life we had forgotten.

Thirty years later, she is still the face I don’t know,
and the face I’d know anywhere.
Sometimes on a foggy night,
or walking the cracked sidewalks of my small town,
I see the open hand so near, the bent body I want
to call back.


© by Mary Jo Balistreri.
Used with the author’s permission.