It’s late. A weekday’s last hour. A small street, Eggleston,
persists with unambitious brick houses, tight with clipped shrubs.
Here, neighbors hear the final flushes of toilets between gang-
ways and quarrels between husbands and wives
who grew up across town in identical homes of their parents
that expect grandchildren and visits on Sundays.
She sits on the edge of the second porch step with knees
pulled close for small comfort. A jug of wine, deep in color
behind thick green glass, sits at her side. Her conversation
with herself remains secret, interrupted only by unplumbed puffs
at her cigarette. A husband is asleep inside, on the couch,
beyond the screened door, beyond kindness, beyond reason.
A baby boy in the crib further back in a bedroom¾
she doesn’t know yet that she won’t see his eighteenth
birthday, that better doesn’t come, or the inabilities of sadness¾
only the quiet, now, under the waxing moon.
