Poem

She Seemed to Need This

She seemed to need this,
sitting alone in a café,
the timer ticking off the seconds
while she writes in her notebook
whatever thoughts arise in the moment.

Like how right now, in the periphery
of her vision, the way a shaft of light
strikes the floor to her right suggests
a stairway one floor below lit from
sunlight streaming through a doorway.

Or the way the trumpet playing
on the café music system conjures
a weekend in Guerneville, California,
40 years ago. The two of them dozing
in the bedroom of this Victorian B&B
with the window open, music drifting
through the redwoods to their room
along with the scent of warm forest earth.

She stops writing a few times, takes a sip
of her espresso and then continues.

She has just returned from a month-long
meditation retreat and she is consciously
nurturing the tender, open-hearted qualities
she felt there, the child-like joy
and positive self-regard.

It takes a special kind of effort to guard against
the regrowth of armor that comes with living
in civilization. She’s not been successful in the past,
but that doesn’t stop her from trying again.
She’s a crypto-optimist, a Pollyanna in a crankpot
68-year-old tranny body.

And at that, she stops, takes one last
sip of her espresso, and closes the notebook.