She may have been eighty-five,
black, a bandanna holding gray curls back
and a print dress faded and
contoured down grandmother curves,
eating a grape;
not as you or I would eat them,
a cluster at a sitting:
she was leaning on her porch railing,
sucking a solitary grape held in her fingertips
like an egg in an egg cup,
her eyes on us, talking about the city
needing her street, taking her house
and there being nothing she could do about it;
that one grape still in her fingertips
five minutes later when we left, glancing back.
circa early 1980's
from Providence on the Itinerant
and Selected Works
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